Using WooCommerce and want to run a multilingual site? Now you can. We’re ready with (beta) versions for WooCommerce, WooCommerce Multilingual and a new WPML version that supports them.
The nice thing was that WooCommerce uses WordPress in a very clean way. This allowed us to turn it multilingual without resorting to any hacks.
We added a few filters to WooCommerce, created a new glue plugins called ‘WooCommerce Multilingual’ and added a bit of support for the new functionality in WPML.
To try all this, you’ll need to download:
- WooCommerce 1.4 or above (it’s always a good idea to use the most recent version)
- WooCommerce Multilingual
- The recent WPML version (from your WPML account)
How it works
The glue plugin doesn’t have any GUI and there’s nothing to configure. It hooks to WooCommerce and makes it multilingual.
You’ll need to add translations for the standard shop pages and add the same shortcodes to them. This will let the checkout and other standard WooCommerce pages appear.
There’s a complete WooCommerce Multilingual Users Guide which you should read when you get started.
Translating products
Go to a product page. You’ll see the languages box. Add on the + icons to add translation. WPML automatically synchronizes the product attributes, such as cost, weight and other properties that should be the same for all languages.
You can also use WPML’s Translation Dashboard to mark products for translation and send all at once.
Shipping and inventory tracking
Shop owners will see all orders going through on the products in the default language. When visitors add products to the cart, WPML will convert them to the products in the default language. It coverts back to the current language for display purposes.
This means that you’re tracking inventory only once per product, no matter in which language it was ordered.
Email notifications
WPML will set the locale to the client’s language when you send your client emails. Meaning, if a client ordered a product when viewing it in French, the client will receive the notification emails in French. For this to happen, you need to have the .mo files for WooCommerce in each language.
Feedback?
This release is the result of weeks of planning and development. We’re eager to receive your feedback and hear about how it’s working for you. Once we know that things are good and complete, this will go into the WooCommerce official code and continue being maintained there.