WPML 4.2.7.1 and a Preview for Next Major Updates

We just released a maintenance update of WPML, which improves compatibility, stability, and performance. But the exciting news is what’s coming. See what’s new today, what’s coming soon and give us your feedback.

WPML 4.2.7.1 News

Translation for Re-Usable Blocks

Reusable Blocks, as their name implies, allow to create an element in Gutenberg (the Block Editor) and use it again in other pages. WordPress smartly saves Reusable Blocks as custom types, so they’re separate from the content where they were originally created.

Now, WPML makes it easy to translate Reusable Blocks. When you use the WPML’s Translation Management, the Reusable Blocks will go to translation together with the content that includes them (if you haven’t translated them before). When you’re translating manually, WPML will show you a reminder on how to translate these blocks.

Any User with “edit_posts” Permission can be a Translation Manager

Until now, WPML only allowed admins and editors to act as the site’s Translation Managers. Now, if you create custom roles and assign them this permission, you can make them your Translation Managers. This is important because larger sites typically setup their own custom user roles. Now, when your custom roles allow users to edit posts, you can allow them to manage translations.

String Translation Performance Improvements

We’ve identified a number of queries that String Translation can avoid. Per call, this is not a lot, but on sites that load thousands of strings, it builds up.

String Translation in this release works faster. However, the upcoming release will completely change the way WPML’s String Translation works and reduce its load to virtually zero.

Fixes

We’ve fixed a number of nagging bugs in this release. The highlights are:

• Fixed exceptions occurring when translating nested blocks.
• Resolved an issue when translating the List Block.
• Resolved an exception causing wrong redirects when having slugs containing only numeric characters.
• Resolved an exception in handling multiple occurrences of the same field in an Elementor node.
• Fixed an issue where Editor/ Shop Manager cannot duplicate a post (this should have been fixed earlier, and got delayed due to an internal workflow problem that we resolved).

Plans for the Next Weeks and Months

We’re working on major changes to WPML, which we hope will make it easier to run multilingual sites and make those sites a lot faster. See what’s planned and give us your feedback, so that we know that we’re building what you need.

Zero-Load String Translation (planned for mid July 2019)

We’re changing the way String Translation works so that it will stop hooking to GetText functions. The idea is to compile the translations into .mo files instead of loading translations from the database.

It looks like this change will reduce the database and CPU load of WPML String Translation to about zero.

We want to make sure that the new String Translation doesn’t cause any slowness for any site. If today’s String Translation is contributing to significant processing time to your site and you’re willing to give us a copy, please open a support ticket that starts with “Test site for String Translation performance”. Our supporters will take the copy of your site and we’ll use it as part of our testing and benchmarks during development.

“Translate Everything” Mode

We reviewed hundreds of client sites and we’ve noticed that almost everything on these sites requires translation. However, today, in order to translate such sites you need to go through multiple admin screens and select different items for translation (posts, taxonomy, strings, etc.).

To make your work a lot easier and avoid wasting your time, we’re working on a new mode that we call “Translate Everything”. In this mode, you don’t need to choose anything. WPML will send everything in your site for translation.

This mode will have two options:

• To translate everything initially (when you install WPML)
• To keep translating new content, as it becomes available

Our aim in this is to make it easier for you to have fully multilingual sites over time, without spending much time managing it.

Automatic Translation with Human Review

We still believe that professional human translation is the best way to have excellent content in all of your site’s languages. We use professional translation for our own sites. However, we also know that professional translation can be expensive and it’s not the ideal solution for all websites.

We’re working on new translation modes that will greatly reduce the time it takes to translate content yourself.

• Automatic translation with human review
• Automatic translation without review

In the first option, any time you send content for translation, it will get translated automatically. Then, this content will wait for a human review before publishing it.

In the second option, there’s no wait. WPML will publish the automatic translation for you. Of course, you can always click and edit these translations later.

From our testing, automatic translation with human review speeds up the translation dramatically. A page that takes me an hour to translate, I can review and polish in a few minutes. That’s over 90% saving for my time. And, because I went over the entire translation, I get great results.

We’re coming to WordCamp Europe in Berlin!

Last, but not least, this week we will be in Berlin for this year’s WordCamp Europe.

Are you coming? You can find us at the WPML table and we’ll be happy to talk!

See you there!

Feedback? Ideas? Suggestions?

Like you already know us, these are not the only features we’re working on. Of course, we’re handling all known bugs and we’re working on smaller features in every release.

If you could give us feedback about these major features, it will help us deliver better what you need. Leave your comments and we’ll get back to you.