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WPML 3.2 Release Candidate

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We’re ready with a Release Candidate for WPML 3.2. An RC, besides sounding nice, also means that we’re almost ready to push this update to everyone. In fact, we’re moving to WPML 3.2 on some of our own sites.

Since previous betas, the content of WPML 3.2 hasn’t changed.

In this update, we’ve further improved performance, closed remaining issues and updated taxonomy translation and String scanning.

Taxonomy Translation News

WPML 3.2 adds a new admin screen (tab under the Taxonomy Translation) to synchronize the hierarchies of taxonomies. Previously, this task was done automatically, as you translate. The problem is, it was hard to control what it does and what you get.

The new taxonomy hierarchy sync lets you set the same hierarchies for taxonomy for all languages. It works by:

  1. Selecting the language to use as reference (previously, this was assumed to be the site’s default language)
  2. Seeing what changes will happen to the taxonomy trees in all translated languages
  3. Applying these changes

We separated this from the normal ‘content translation’ workflow to (greatly) improve performance, accuracy and control. Most sites that use complex taxonomy hierarchies will usually edit the taxonomy tree a lot less than editing posts. From our experience, the taxonomy tree is a lot like the site’s menu. You update it once in a while.

Taxonomy hierarchy sync in WPML 3.2
Taxonomy hierarchy sync in WPML 3.2

The new taxonomy sync reads the entire tree and adjusts all languages together. It’s way more accurate than what we ran in previous WPML versions. To avoid this from running on every translation job, we allow you to run it only when you want. This helps reduce load and puts you in control over the taxonomy of your site.

Improved String Scanning in Plugins and Themes

WPML 3.2 greatly improves the accuracy of scanning plugins and themes for translatable strings. Now, we also register strings under a slightly different context. No fear, when you upgrade, WPML will check if you have strings with the ‘old’ contexts. If so, you will see a message about how to update. The update process will move strings to the new context, make sure that all strings in the code are available for translation and also clean up ‘phantom’ strings (untranslated strings, no longer in use).

Yes, Better Performance

During this entire development cycle, we test WPML’s load on your server together with every change we make. Our goal is to cut any fat that we see and make sure that both CPU load and DB queries go down.

This release candidate is no exception. We managed to find pockets of queries which could be eliminated. As a result, our testing shows superior performance over production and previous WPML 3.2 dev versions. Instead of boasting with numbers, we leave this to you to evaluate.

Other Changes in This Update

  • Fixed compatibility issues with Windows servers
  • Fixed email notifications
  • Fixed issues with WPSEO sitemaps when using languages in domain
  • Updated localized strings translations
  • Several other bug fixes
  • Improved API and its documentation
  • Improved compatibility with Gravity forms

Download

This version of WPML is only available from your WPML account. Log in and click on Downloads. Download the CMS Beta package and unzip it. This ZIP contains ZIP files of all of WPML’s components.

WPML 3.2 has already completed a round of QA. Now, after all recent changes, we’re starting another full QA cycle. We expect to release the final version in two weeks from now.

Feedback?

We’d love to hear your opinion. For questions, suggestions and ideas, leave your comments here. To report technical problems (and get help from our supporters), please use our technical support forum.

Update June 7 – Week’s Delay and Better Performance

WPML 3.2 got delayed a bit, but is also getting a lot better. Just before hitting the ‘launch’ button, we ran more testing with our own sites. We discovered bad performance and stopped everything to debug this. Turns out, WPML 3.2 had some unfortunate interaction with WPSEO and a few other plugins. We sorted this out and now WPML runs at about 1/2 of the queries and PHP time than 3.1.9.7.

We are going to rerun QA for the relevant functionality. This QA starts tomorrow (Monday). After this, we will release WPML 3.2.

We’re really sorry for this additional delay. We know this development cycle has been long. It’s been a long and complex development cycle and we want to bring this new version to you, in a way that meets expectations.

17 Responses to “WPML 3.2 Release Candidate”

  1. Hi, A question about security. A website has already been hacked due to the WPML exploit, since fixed. What improvements in security have you made in 3.2?

    • If you’ve noticed a security exploit that it not handled currently in the production version of WPML (3.1.9.7) we certainly must fix it. Let me know if this is the case and I will connect you with our developers, who will handle this right away.

    • Hi Amir, no, this is not a new exploit but the recent exploit for which you released a security update in March/April.

      Today, WordPress released 4.2.2 followed by Jetpack “hardening security”. The attacks seem to be becoming more frequent. So, once again, security is a priority.

      • That’s a relief. Just for your info, following our security update in April, we did a complete (100%) review of the entire code. This review uncovered a number of additional security alerts. These are things that looked like possible hack opportunities. 95% of them are false alerts. A few turned out to be hack opportunities, but very difficult ones. Nothing that can be exploited from the front-end, but users that have a lower level than ‘editor’. We also addressed these in following updated, but didn’t make much noise about them, because they are really not critical. If you have an editor that wants to cause damage to your site, there are far easier ways to do it than conjure complex attacks (on the WordPress admin).

        Anyway, if you even notice or suspect a security issue in our production release, do let us know and we’ll handle it immediately.

    • Thomas,

      We are under QA for 3.2: this requires time.

      As soons as QA is completed, we will release 3.2 which contains this fix.

    • Hi Andru,

      We have two types of widgets in WPML.

      The core widgets, that is, the widget coming from WordPress: we can definitely improve this, as we know how they are made. At the moment we only make the Text Widget translatable via String Translation.

      Widgets created by other themes and plugins: in this case the theme/plugin developer needs to get in touch with us in order to help them making the widgets translatable.

      We recently introduced a feature for developers, called “Package Translation” which would fit perfectly to help translating widgets even better via the Translation Management add-on.

  5. im hopeful for this Taxonomy translation addtion – it looks like woocommerce multilingual will benifit..

  7. No beta / RC for the humble “blog” subscirbers?

    I’d really like to try the 3.2 version.
    3.1.9.7 was killing my site’s performances (from 55 to 320 queries per page, 70% of all plugins load time), so I disabled it (and I’m looking for a plugin-less solution for my case, as it’s just some pages and a custom post type -with some small custom taxonomies- I can handle in the theme code).

    If 3.2 significantly reduces the number of queries.. I might save hours of work 🙂

    • No need anymore. It’s going out this week.

      Please note that number of queries is not all. In some cases, a number of very fast queries is preferable to a single huge query. We’re planning to push WPML 3.2. If you still feel performance problems after this update, we will work with you until they are resolved.

  8. High, You said you expected to release the final version in two weeks from now (06/05/2015) but we are still waiting for it.

    Have you got an expected released date?

    Many thanks and regards from Madrid, Adolfo

    • Hello Adolfo,

      This is Sarah from the WPML development team. The final version is about to be released very soon. WPML developers are doing their best to close some final performance issues that came up last minute and they hope that 3.2 will be released sometime next week.