I kindly ask you to consider adding support for the Breakdance page builder. This is a relatively new builder (1,5 years) and getting a lot of new users, including huge numbers from Elementor. Most of the current users of Breakdance complain that WPML does not offer support for this and they have to look for alternatives - which exist and work, although may of us would prefer use our agency licenses for these builds.
Breakdance isn't currently compatible. Breakdance have no intention of integrating with WPML, and right now we are not currently working on adding compatibility.
That could change if we find large numbers of WPML clients using Breakdance, but currently those numbers are small in comparison to popular page builders like Elementor or Divi.
I've added this thread to the internal ticket where we are tracking this, to help gauge demand.
Hello Nigel,
Thanks for your reply. I don’t know if you follow the thread on Breakdance’s feature request site, but look here: hidden link
There is also a short video from the Breakdance’s CEO Louis Reingold with the email correspondence with you guys (back from last year). He’s very open to provide any bits and pieces (APIs, action hooks, filters, docs, etc.) you might need to make this integration happen.
I also wonder how will you properly asses when is the right moment of “large numbers of WPML clients using Breakdance”? It may seem that you may lose some clients due to lack of this integration and not get new ones that could select your solution when using Breakdance. Your clients will not be using Breakdance because it’s not compatible, so this argument is incorrect. And I suppose that no more than 1% of people wanting this integration will reach out to you like I did here, so that you will have specific feedback.
Of course it’s understandable that you might want to focus on the high volume builders and provide integration with those, but the market is evolving, new players are coming, users are moving, and your plugin is one of the major in the market. That means that for the moment you get 0 users for all the thousands (right, not millions) that use Breakdance for multilingual projects.
I look forward that you take active approach on this – perhaps by joining the above feature request Breakdance forum with an official statement, question, poll or anything else besides waiting.
We have, of course, made a similar offer to Breakdance, to provide them with every assistance and collaboration to make Breakdance operable with WPML, which is something we do with countless other plugin and theme authors all the time.
You highlight the loss of revenue we are potentially missing out on from those Breakdance users who would like to use WPML (the reverse is likely also true), while ignoring the costs of creating the integration.
Such an integration would not be trivial, and would take developers away from existing projects. It's also important to understand this is not just about the development work today, but about the maintenance of that integration into the future. When 3rd party products that we maintain integrations for make breaking changes, it is us that has to drop everything to provide a fix for our users that depend upon it. I would speculate that as a fairly young product, there are a lot of breaking changes in the road ahead when it comes to working with Breakdance, whereas our APIs are extremely stable.
So WPML management will continue to monitor the evolution of Breakdance as a product and see how popular it becomes with WPML's user base, and they may judge at some point it worth the investment to add an integration layer, but we are not there yet.
Thank you @Nigel for this. Now I understand better. It's a little odd though that in the end the user like me is not sure which side has more dev work to do in order for this compatibility to take life, as each side takes a similar approach like "we have provided all the necessary stuff to the other party so that they can work on it".
It is of course understandable that from your side preparing such compatibility is not a one time job but an extra open chapter and new support issues on regular basis with an extra external product - which is possible, but just needs to have business sense in the end. In this case I hope that the near future will bring such sense to all parties involved and Breakdance getting popular enough to see such integration in the relatively close horizon 👍
Lost users on each side is of course an inevitable result, as I already see such comments on facebook groups related at least to BD (don't know about lost WPML users though). Can't have everything in the end 🙂
Thanks again for your time in replying to this. All the best and looking forward to a BD-WPML engagement soon 😉
This thread can be closed now.
