Today, we have several good news, all at once. WPML 2.9.2 improves compatibility with WordPress 3.6, Media Translation and WooCommerce Multilingual make it possible to run solid multilingual e-commerce sites.
This update of WPML was supposed to include just small warnings fixes for WordPress 3.6, but it turned out to be a lot nicer. We added several new features that are essential for conveniently running e-commerce sites (but will help many other sites too), as well as performance improvements.
WordPress 3.6 Ironing
WordPress 3.6 deprecated several functions. They are still there and work normally, but throw warnings in debug mode. If you ran WordPress 3.6 with WPML and debug mode enabled, you probably saw a bunch of warnings about wpdb::escape. We’ve replaced this call with a newer one and the warnings are gone. This didn’t (yet) cause any error, but we shouldn’t be calling deprecated functions.
This release also addresses a few other cosmetic issues with PHP strict standards and with post formats in WordPress 3.6.
Toolset Compatibility
If you are tracking our Toolset project, you might have noticed that we’re putting a very big emphasis on WPML compatibility. Today, we are also releasing major updates for both Types and Views. These updates include major new functionality, as well as greatly improved user interface and workflow. Among the improvements are completely streamlined WPML support. Some of the changes to support this went into WPML itself.
Some of the notable things that Toolset now does with WPML:
- Full-multilingual parametric searches. This sounds easy, but it was far from that.
- Streamlined translations for Content Templates (page templates that you create from within the WordPress admin).
- Complete translation for all image fields, including values and labels.
The idea is, if you’re building custom functionality with Toolset, you want to «not feel WPML». Meaning, everything should be translatable without any effort or having to figure out what goes where. So, Types 1.4 and Views 1.3 now work great with WPML 2.9.2, allowing you to build multilingual sites, just as if they were single-language sites.
New Media Translation and WooCommerce Multilingual
Complete documentation, download instructions and step-by-step usage, are available in the new WooCommerce Multilingual beta page.
Among the new updates that we’re especially happy with is a first beta (finally) of WooCommerce Multilingual. This version comes after months of development, experiencing ups and downs. In the process, we had to completely rewrite the Media Translation plugin, to support the demanding functionality we needed for e-commerce sites.
Right now, both the Media Translation and WooCommerce Multilingual are in beta version. The first beta is available to download and experiment with. Have a look at this video to see how it works:
The highlights in this WooCommerce Multilingual release:
- WooCommerce Multilingual automatically sets up the store pages and does the necessary setup, so that things «just work».
- Central location for translating products.
- Central location for translating product attributes
- You only need to translate product names and description. WooCommerce Multilingual sets up the variations for you.
- Variations and product images are automatically synchronized across all languages.
- Language is maintained through the entire purchase process.
In short, our aim was to let you (and us) run multilingual e-commerce sites conveniently. You will no longer need to read thousands of words of explanations and follow them to the letting. It will all happen automatically, where you only enter the translation for texts. WooCommerce Multilingual does the rest.
At the moment, we are in the first (but very stable) beta. There are a few known glitches, but they have very simple work-arounds and are not critical.
This week, we are putting the final design touches on the admin screens, as well as completing last features. We hope to receive as much feedback as possible from beta testers and we will have a solid first release in the first days of September. We are sending out emails with detailed instructions to everyone who signed-up for our beta testing.
What Next
We have a very busy schedule coming up for WPML. Remember our talks about Roles management? This is coming next. We also have a few ideas about improved variables caching and other things that may boost performance.
For multilingual E-Commerce, our plans do not stop with WooCommerce. As soon as WooCommerce Multilingual is released, we will apply the same solution to Jigoshop, MarketPress and any other e-commerce plugin that we can.
We received very valuable information about multilingual classifieds sites. Our compatibility team, as well as the classifieds development in Toolset, are hard to work making this happen.
Exciting times ahead!
What do You Think?
We love to hear from you. Leave your comments here and we’ll get back to you.
And yes, if you’re an outstanding developer, looking for a great place to work, we have a job for you. Contact us if you think you have what it takes to work on WPML.