WPML 3.3 Makes it Easy to Run Sites Without English

We’re very happy to release today WPML 3.3. The major news in this version is the support for sites that don’t have English as their source language (or don’t have English at all). Besides this, WPML 3.3 comes with a long list of other notable improvements and additions.

This concludes a long release cycle, in which we got amazing support from you, our very dear clients. We released several test versions and received priceless feedback from you. Since the change to WPML was so big, it was important for us to get feedback from people running different sites with different configurations. So, a big thanks to everyone who tested the betas and RCs until now!

Multilingual Sites Without English

The vast majority of WordPress sites are no longer “English Biased”. This release of WPML helps build such sites. English loses its unique status in WPML. You can create a site in any language and translate content and strings from any language to any other language. You can even translate different strings from different source languages.

Better Integration with Translation Services

So far, you could choose ICanLocalize and Cloudwords, as your translation providers. WPML 3.3 includes a number of features that were needed by several other translation services. In the next few days, we will be launching quiet internal tests with several leading translation vendors. Then, we will announce each separately.

Stability and Theme Compatibility

In this development cycle, we added significant coverage for WPML code via automated tests. This is done through a combination of ‘unit’ and ‘integration’ tests. A complete test suite makes it possible for us to make more bold moves, without running the risk of breaking things. WPML 3.3 resolves a good number of glitches and compatibility problems.

Download and Update

Please backup your database before updating WPML. It’s a good idea to make backup before you update WordPress, themes and plugins. We create backups before any round of updates, for any plugin that we use. 30 seconds now can help save hours later.

The best way to get updates for WPML is from inside the WordPress admin. Make sure to register your site. Then, you will receive automatic updates for all new versions. You can download this update from your WPML account, under Downloads.

What’s Next for WPML?

As you probably know, WordPress 4.4 adds taxonomy meta. Yeay! This is something that many have been waiting for. We are hard at work at adding support for taxonomy meta (fields) to WPML. This is going to be a major project for us, as it affects many places in the plugin. You will be able to translate taxonomy meta manually, via the Translation Editor and by translation services. We are right now planning for this and I’ll write a separate post when we have something. Translation for taxonomy meta will probably arrive a bit after WordPress 4.4 is released. This should be OK, because most themes and plugins will probably need a bit of time before they use this great new feature.

Besides support for taxonomy meta, we are also revamping the user interface and translation workflow for WooCommerce Multilingual. The new UI will look nicer and also be a lot easier to use. We know that it requires major improvements for both site admins and ‘translator’ users. Together with this update, we are also going to optimize performance of WooCommerce Multilingual, especially in the WordPress admin.

And, last but not least, we think that it’s about time to give some love to the language switchers in WPML. For a while, we haven’t improved the configuration interface or the available options. We received a lot of good feedback about language switchers and we’re planning to put it to good use.

Feedback?

As always, we are attention starved. We would love to hear your feedback, ideas and questions. Leave your comments and we will get back to you. For support-related issues, best to create threads in our technical support forum and mention their links in your comments.