Welcome to the WPML support forum. I visited your site and it seems that on the French version you have Visual Composer shortcode like [vc_section] (vc stands for visual composer) placed into paragraphs. While, on your ENglish page you are using Elementor.
Did you switch from Visual composer to Elementor recently? I don't see Visual composer installed in your debug file.
I'm not sure of the situation here, so please give me as much detail as possible. But I would think that permanently deleting that French page (move to trash and empty the trash) and then re-translate the English page using our Advanced Translation Editor (ATE) should fix the issue. Make sure you have a backup first.
Yes, you are right. I was using Visual Composer before, still am on the production site. I have now deleted all code in the French file, and re-translated (simply by clicking the green check for each sentence as the translations were still present).
Now, the right content is present in the editor. And the front page translates well using the language switcher.
Yes, you are right. I was using Visual Composer before, still am on the production site. I have now deleted all code in the French file, and re-translated (simply by clicking the green check for each sentence as the translations were still present).
Now, the right content is present in the editor. And the front page translates well using the language switcher.
I'm not sure to understand that part "I need to delete the old WPBakery packages. I don't recall how to do so without losing my old translations."
If your pages were built using WP Bakery and translated with WPML unfortunately they will contain those shortcodes ([vc_section]) because they are added by the builder to create the layout/design.
Now if you update a WP Bakery page and switch to Elementor, you will need to retranslate the page in order to apply Elementor's layout to the translation.
Does it make sense?
If you want to keep the WP Bakery pages to retrieve the translations, you can set those pages as drafts and create a new page with Elementor.
The translated page (in this case, the front page) is always behind. Right now, the language switcher is NOT the same on the French page compared to the English page.
The French translation page eventually updates itself to reflect the design change given to the English page. But, it take forever... There's got to be a fix to that.
1. "delete the WP Bakery packages in WPML->Packages one at a time."
> If you completely switched to Elementor and don't use Wp Bakery anymore, yes you can delete translations package to clean up your database. But that's not what is causing the issue here.
2. "If you want to keep the WP Bakery pages to retrieve the translations, you can set those pages as drafts and create a new page with Elementor."
> Sorry if I wasn't clear enough here. I'm not sure what is your situation, if you completely switched to Elementor or if you're still in the process of passing your pages from WP Bakery to Elementor. That's why I recommended, if you need to access the WP bakery page while working on it's new Elementor version. Instead of overwriting the WP Bakery Page with Elementor, you can create a new page in parallele to copy your content from WP Bakery to Elementor. Once the Elementor page is finished and published, you can then delete the WP Bakery "old version". Does it make sense?
3. I'm not sure to understand what you mean by "always behind". If changes made in the backend take a long time to appear on the frontend it could be a caching issue. Maybe you need to manually purge your cache after a design change.
If you have any pending issue or can reproduce the issue, could you please make a short video (I'm using loom.com for example). That would greatly help me understand your issue.
1. I have no intention to even go back to WPBakery. If I delete all the WPBakery packages, will that erase all my prior translations within staging?
2. The original WPBakery pages are still intact on the production site. I'm only working on staging now. What I normally do is: A) I delete the content of the WPBakery pages one at a time from within staging. B) I reconstruct the page in Elementor while copying and pasting the needed text from production site. C) I never delete the files, only empty their content via select all code and click delete.
3. Yes clearing the server plugins cache EVERY time seems to help.
Thanks, I understand better now. Point #2 from my last answer is irrelevant as you are copying the content from the production site.
What I would do if the following:
- Go to pages and delete the content of the page in the original language
- Use the flag in the top bar admin bar to switch to the secondary language and also delete content
- Start from blank pages, create the original page with Elementor and then translate it.
- Once you're done you can clean up your database by deleting the packages related to WP Bakery.
I was thinking of doing one page at a time. Each database has a number associated with it. I was told each database matches a certain webpage, and that I need to make sure of it before deleting a database. I just can't remember how to find out that database number on a webpage itself.
When you're editing a page you can find the post ID in he url. In the URL example below, the ID is 703:
domain.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=703&action=edit&lang=en
