WPML 3.1.5b2 with WordPress 3.9 Support

Today is the official target date for WordPress 3.9 release (and also the day before Easter and Passover). We’re happy to release a second beta for WPML 3.1.5, with complete WordPress 3.9 support and other goodies.

Although this major WordPress version looks pretty similar on the surface, it packs a number of important changes to API and internal functionality. These changes are great for developers, as they make all WordPress code cleaner and nicer to work with. However, many plugins need to be updated to support the new API and remove deprecated calls.

WPML 3.1.5 addresses all the new stuff in WordPress 3.9. Since we’re just before a major holiday, we are holding back this update for next week. WPML 3.1.5 is after our complete QA and testing. It’s ready for development sites and we’ll update our own sites to it next week.

If you can give it a try on sites that you are developing now, especially with WordPress 3.9, it will be great!

Here is the list of major updates to WPML and its components.

WPML core

• Further performance improvements: we’ve reduced the amount of repeated queries ran by WPML
• Improved usability
• Tested and fixed compatibility with WordPress 3.9 (this will be further improved in next release)
• Fixed notices caused by mysql_* function when using PHP 5.5+
• Fixed dependencies issues
• Fixed parent-child page relationship issues
• Fixed sub queries pagination when shown in home page
• Fixed compatibility with CRED/Views
• Fixed issues in root page
• Fixed ajax requests loosing current language information

WPML CMS NAV

• Tested and fixed compatibility with WordPress 3.9 (this will be further improved in next release)
• Fixed notices caused by mysql_* function when using PHP 5.5

WPML MEDIA

• Tested and fixed compatibility with WordPress 3.9 (this will be further improved in next release)
• Fixed dependencies issues

WPML STICKY LINKS

• Tested and fixed compatibility with WordPress 3.9 (this will be further improved in next release)
• Fixed notices caused by mysql_* function when using PHP 5.5
• Fixed dependencies issues
• Proper support of custom post types

WPML STRING TRANSLATION

• Tested compatibility with WordPress 3.9
• Fixed slug translation issues

WPML TRANSLATION ANALYTICS

• Tested compatibility with WordPress 3.9
• Fixed dependencies issues

WPML TRANSLATION MANAGEMENT

• Tested compatibility with WordPress 3.9
• Minor bugfixes

WPML XLIFF

• Tested compatibility with WordPress 3.9
• Added support to multiple XLIFF versions
• Fixed XLIFF import issues

Download and Install

As this is still a beta release, you can get it manually from your wpml.org account. Log in, go to Downloads, scroll to the bottom and get the WPML Beta Package. It’s a ZIP, which contains ZIP files of all of WPML’s components.

This update is fine for development sites. If you are upgrading sites from previous WPML versions, make sure that you upgrade all of WPML’s components.

Should I Update to WordPress 3.9?

At the time of writing this blog post WordPress 3.9 is not officially released yet (still in release candidate). Easter vacation is starting tomorrow and we don’t recommend doing major upgrades when not everyone is here. Even if WordPress 3.9 is released today, we will wait with it for our own sites for next week. Then, we’re going to run it on a test site with all plugins updated and test everything.

As WordPress 3.9 includes big changes under the surface, we’re going to carefully test our sites before we upgrade. All our testing show that WPML 3.1.5 works smoothly with WordPress 3.9. We are using a number of other plugins and have some code in our theme and I think that careful testing is better than panic problem fixing.

Feedback? Ideas? Questions?

I hope that you manage to experiment with WPML 3.1.5 on your development sites. Please give us your feedback by leaving comments. We’re attention junkies 🙂