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WPML 4.5.13 – Updates for WordPress 6.1

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WordPress 6.1 was released on November 1st and contains critical, breaking issues with WPML. We recently released WPML 4.5.13 and String Translation 3.2.3 to fix these.

WordPress 6.1 introduces breaking changes 

To avoid breaking your site, you must update to WPML 4.5.13 and String Translation 3.2.3 before updating to WordPress 6.1.

How to Update WPML

WPML 4.5.13 and String Translation 3.2.3 are now available to all WPML clients. You can get these updates from your Downloads page, or by visiting the Plugins page.

Updating WPML and String Translation

What to Do If WordPress 6.1 Breaks Your Site

If you update to WordPress 6.1 before updating WPML, you will see a fatal error on your site. If you have already tried to update WPML using the steps above and are unable to, please try the following fix:

  1. Disable String Translation to make your site’s front-end accessible for others.
  2. Update WPML core to 4.5.13 and String Translation to 3.2.3.
  3. Re-enable String Translation.

If you are not able to access your site’s admin or none of the previous steps seem to work, please try any of these options:

  • Manually update WPML using FTP (if you cannot log in to your site).
  • Roll back to a previous version of WordPress, then update WPML.
  • Restore your site from a backup, then update WPML before updating WordPress.
  • Use FTP to change the String Translation plugin folder name, which will deactivate it. You can then delete it from the plugins page and reinstall it with the latest version.

How to Disable Future Automatic WordPress Feature Updates

You can disable future automatic WordPress updates except for maintenance and security updates by going to Dashboard → Updates and clicking the link, Switch to automatic updates for maintenance and security releases only. 

Switching to automatic updates for WordPress maintenance and security releases only

It’s important to note that some hosting providers may automatically update WordPress versions. In that case, you will need to contact them to stop automatic updates.

Why This Happened

This WordPress release has been a moving target with changes introduced between each release candidate, and bugs that weren’t fixed. What’s more, the release date was a holiday for many of our European clients and coworkers.

Normally, we do not release an update until it has been tested thoroughly with the latest WordPress release. However, due to the fact that there was no final version of WordPress 6.1 available until the last minute, we wanted to provide you with an update for the critical issues we were aware of as soon as possible.

Known Issues in WordPress 6.1

These WPML releases address several known issues from WordPress 6.1, including:

WPML Core 4.5.12 & 4.5.13:

  • Fixed a notice related to WP_object_cache
  • Added support for translating the new List-item Gutenberg block
  • Fixed an issue with registering strings coming from the Elementor Flexbox container
  • Fixed an issue with the Block widget text being unexpectedly wrapped with a paragraph tag
  • Fixed the issue where Block widgets translations were not applied any more
  • Fixed an issue with the menu language switcher where the wpml-ls-first-item class was applied to the current language instead of the first listed language. This issue was introduced in WordPress 6.1 and WPML 4.5.12.
  • Fixed an issue with the hierarchical language menus to make sure it is not possible to not display the current language in such menus.

String Translation 3.2.3:

  • Fixed a fatal error that occurs when running WPML with WordPress version 6.1.

Please note: WordPress 6.1 may introduce issues with other plugins and themes as well. Be sure to keep all your themes and plugins up to date to prevent issues.

Questions or Comments?

Let us know in the comments section below, and we’ll reply.

218 Responses to “WPML 4.5.13 – Updates for WordPress 6.1”

      • What’s worrying though it’s that we’re well into Monday and no updates have yet popped up. I’ve followed Gary’s tip and disabled the automatic updated to 6.1, but still it would be reassuring if the update becomes available soon. I’m in Western Europe, and if the updates are released late, it may very well be nighttime here.

        • Hi Floris – We don’t recommend updating to WordPress 6.1 right away anything because we don’t know if any new issues will result from the final version (which isn’t available yet). We’re testing against a release candidate right now because that’s all that’s available. If possible, maybe wait a couple of days before updating to WordPress 6.1 because I’m sure we’re not the only plugin or theme in this situation right now.

  2. So hang on. Let me get this straight.

    You’re telling me something’s going to break on Tuesday, but the final fix won’t be available until Monday (and not necessarily early in the morning when it would be most useful). Meanwhile I can try out the ‘might break, might not’ beta version on Thursday, but I have to make a development version of my website to try the beta on, so that if it keels over and dies, at least it’s only a staging site and the live site’s not affected. But if it does keel over and die, that’s just too bad, because the live site will auto-update to WP6.1 on Tuesday anyway, which will also break the website. Is that right?

    I have 16 client websites using WPML. All 16 websites will automatically update to the latest version of WP when it’s released. That will be Tuesday, and you still don’t have a final version of your plugin updates – and won’t until Monday, and it might not be until Monday night in my time zone.

    Can you see what the problem is?

    How on earth am I to get this done, on Monday, a single day (or worse, a single NIGHT) for 16 websites? Creating 16 staging sites, testing the WPML beta, and if it breaks the sites trying to figure out how to fix it – all in a matter of hours?

    You’re making a bit of a habit of this!

    Clearly, a lot of us are not going to have time to fix multiple websites in a single day. So what you need to do now is let us know how to fix things when the inevitable website deaths happen. Have you got that worked out yet? If so, please do spill the beans!

    • Hi Debs – I understand your frustration. Unfortunately, WordPress still has not made a final version of 6.1 available yet, and so far there have been changes between each release candidate. Monday afternoon is the “dry run” of WordPress 6.1, and assuming that goes as planned, they will release 6.1 on Tuesday. In the meantime, we are doing our best to fix the issues we’re aware of and make those available to you ahead of the release. If you can wait for a couple of days to update the sites to WordPress 6.1, that will give all plugin and theme authors some time to make sure there are no other issues introduced in the final 6.1 version.

      • But WordPress will *automatically* update on Tuesday. I’m waiting for my hosts to confirm if there’s a way to stop that happening from within my hosting, but if not, I’m going to have to *manually* prevent the core update by editing 16 wp-config.php files. Oh joy.

    • @Debs: the problem here is not WPML. The problem is that your setup automatically updates your production sites on the day of the release. Why would you ever want to do that? I can’t think of a single reason why any reasonable developer would configure their sites like that. So, do you not test the final version of major releases of WordPress before letting the new version out in production? Really?!

      I’ve been employed at two WordPress-aligned agencies and consulted on countless other WordPress sites, and across all of the sites I’ve ever worked on I can tell you for certain we have never configured it like that. It just seems like a really bad idea.

      Would you care to elaborate a bit on why you have your sites configured this way?

      • I agree with @vtamm, it doesn’t sound like WPML is at fault here, seems like they’re doing their best to get out ahead of a challenging situation for their team. It’s hard to plan a release of your own plugin when you’re integrating it with a software release that isn’t solidified yet. They are doing you a solid by giving you advanced notice. Auto-updating WordPress core on a production site does not seem like the best practice.

    • WordPress was an answer to many problems a long time ago. With the years, it’s really showing itself up. I’ve had programmers literally look at me and say “who coded this?” and we are talking about latest WordPress Release Candidate’s.

      Most of my Designers won’t touch it with a barge pole, and it’s only really tolerable by those that are bodging websites together and dabble in a bit of webdev, that happens to be a large proportion of web-builders!

      I hear your pain mate!

    • I totally feel you. However, automatic updates are almost never a good option when managing a larger number of websites. Just sayin’

  3. Hi Allison,

    on my clients Website I use wordpress 5.8.6
    and WPML Multilingual CMS – Version 4.0.5
    and WPML String Translation – Version 2.8.5

    Can I straight update to WPML 4.5.12 and String Translation 3.2.3 and then to WordPress 6.1?
    Or do I need first a lower Version?

    Thank you in advance,
    Ralph

  4. Just a bit of help for anyone who needs to stop WordPress auto-updating for a while in order to get some breathing space. You can add define( ‘WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE’, false ); to your wp-config file.

        • Debs, you can add those lines of code to your wp-config.php files today, it doesn’t have to happen Monday evening. It should take you a few minutes to do that sixteen times.

        • Just as a reference for anyone coming to this comments thread for answers: as suggested, I added the line define( ‘WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE’, false ); to wp-config.php for each of those 16 websites, and this morning I have woken up to emails from every one of those websites saying they have still auto-updated to WordPress 6.1. So, it didn’t work 🙁

          I’m therefore going to have to downgrade WP to 6.0.3 on each of those websites before updating WPML.

          • Hi Debs – It’s possible your hosting company does automatic updates. I’m sorry to hear it’s caused more work for you.

            • Every day’s a school day with WordPress! 🙂

              It looks like some sites auto-updated despite the extra line in wp-config; but others haven’t (yet!).

              On the ones that auto-updated, the majority of the websites are now broken.

              Thankfully, having discussed this with the hosting company, they are going to roll back the WP version for me on those sites, which I hope will reverse the problem so I can nip in and update WPML before updating WP again.

              So – still some work, but hopefully not quite as much as I had feared. Fingers crossed!

    • Watch out for those pesky curly quotes here; the statement won’t work as is, you have to replace the quotes with basic apostrophes.

    • @Gary

      Your solution gives me an error:
      Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Undefined constant “‘WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE’””

      And other solution to stop auto-updating?

    • define( ‘WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE’, false );

      This code will work, make sure that you are copying it correctly and that your ‘ are not getting converted into those ‘ that look the same but are in fact different characters.

  7. hi looks like my site already updated and I cant login anymore – how can I revert this to get access again?

  8. Thanks for the heads up.
    Checking the cabinet to make sure I have enough wine for the weekend while I make the necessary site backups first.

    • Hi Sumner – Hopefully the solution Gary provided will be an easy fix for you. It never hurts to create a site backup before an update, though 👍

    • Hi Dirk – You can download the updates from your Downloads page and upload them to your site. The betas are available now, and the production versions will be available on Monday.

  11. Please, could you translate this release to spanish? I’d like to send it as a reference to our clients, it’s a little hard to explain (and even harder to believe). Thanks in advance.

  12. Hi,

    what if the site automatically updated to WordPress 6 before the WPML update and when trying to access the site we receive a message asking to update the database of the site and no other possibility before granting access ? Don’t know what to do.

    • Hi Jean-Pierre – the issues are with WordPress 6.1, which doesn’t come out until Tuesday. You can disable automatic updates using the solution shared by Gary here in the comments. Or if you’re seeing this message now, please contact our support team so they can help you investigate.

      • Hi Allison,

        thanks for the answer. Since I have no other choice, I will click on the button asking me to start the process of updating the Data Base. Then, I will disable the automatic update. Thanks again for your help.

        jp

    • Hi Eva – We don’t have a specific time available. We are still running tests on the latest WordPress Release Candidate, which was made available over the weekend. Once we can confirm everything is ok, we will make the 4.5.12 update available.

    • Hi Stijn – The issues include fatal errors that occur when using WPML with WordPress 6.1 – not limited to clients using Gutenberg.

  15. Hi Allison, ok thank you for the update.

    What to do if the update 6.1 is already installed but WPML isn’t updated yet.

    Is there already documentation available to manually fix things?

    • We do not recommend installing 6.1 before updating WPML. The WordPress 6.1 update isn’t out yet, but we have the 4.5.12 beta available now if you’re looking to test one of the WordPress release candidates. If you’re experiencing any issues, please contact our support team so they can investigate it further.

  16. Hi Allison,

    I get that, and I’m not planning to do so but as can see from my account, I have many websites running WPML.

    As I expect, some sites will be forgotten to update manually and have the core auto updated. So I need to be able to fix this manually when this happens instead of making a support ticket for every website.

    • You can turn off automatic updates just to make sure that doesn’t happen – Gary left a comment earlier with instructions 🙂

  17. Hi Allison,

    I get that but this isn’t an option for me.

    Please provide documentation on what to do when WordPress get updated to 6.1 but you’re stilling running older WPML version.

    • We do not have any documentation to provide at this time. If this happens, please update to WPML 4.5.12 and String Translation 3.2.3. If you need further assistance after updating, you’ll need to contact our support team.

  18. More of an FYI, thank anything else. It appears that WPML Core 4.5.12 and String Translation 3.2.3 are now available! Thanks Allison for the transparency on this one. I don’t envy your support department tomorrow AM. Hopefully it all goes smoothly for y’all!

  20. Thanks for the heads up Allison. It’s good that you gradually roll out this version, but to force it to download via Plugins » Add New » Commercial is too many steps if you have to do that on multiple websites (17 in my case).

    Can you please improve this process for the next time around so you can force WP to show these updates? I have two suggestions for that:

    1) As soon as you have updated one site through new plugin » commercial, automatically roll out the update to all other websites that use the same WPML account.
    2) Add an option to the wpml account » registered sites page that allows you to indicate you want to get the update right now.

    Thanks
    JP

  21. Still don’t have the updates.. WordPress dashboard shows everything is updated but WPML are the old versions.
    Is there something I must do to get them?

    • Hi Zaffy – Please see the last section of the announcement above for instructions on how to check for the update.

  22. Good morning,
    it is 7 am Tuesday in my time zone in Asia now. The new version of WPML is available on a website installation in Switzerland, but it is not on a website hosted by Siteground and not on a website hosted by Ionos in Germany.

    • Hi Stefan – That’s correct. We are rolling out the release gradually. The last section of the announcement above walks you through how to force a check for the WPML update, however we still recommend waiting for a few days before updating to WordPress 6.1 so we can make sure there are no new issues introduced in the final version.

  23. Quick question,

    I had to revert from 6.1 to 6.0.3 on one of my websites this morning as it had already done the autoupdate and taken my site out, on finding this post i find myself in a bit of a predicamaent you see I don’t have the “Commercial” tab in my plugins page – any clues on what to do to get this to show?

    Cheers

    Woody

    • Hi Woody – What version of WPML are you using? It should appear for sites using WPML 4.4 or later. If you’re using an older version, you may need to update incrementally (see this errata for instructions). If you are using 4.4 or later, please open a support ticket so our team can look into this for you.

  24. Hello,

    I was away and and 6.30 Italian time the WordPress 6.1 has been installed automatically on my website that now is crashing.
    Please advice how to fix it now, other the restore it from a backup. Thanks.

  25. Good morning, my website was automatically updated to v6.1 (I didn’t notice this is turned on), there is a fatal error coming from WMPL plugin. Once trying to downgrade with Updraft to backup from a week ago, WordPress automatically spins on v6.1 instead of latest v6.0.3. Do you know how to proceed now? I’m using WPML Multilingual CMS, WPML String Translation and Advanced Custom Fields Multilingual. I appreciate any help. Thanks!