For a few hours I have requested the support team to help me solve the issue regarding WPML and menus. All 3 attempts resulted in a temporary solution and after 30 minutes or so the issue comes back. I will try to explain in the most detail:
In the WPM Appearance-> Menus I currently see 4 languages each with 11 menus. However only one of the language has all the menus on the dropdown list and they are repeated 4 times. If I change languages, the screen states there are no menus for that language.
Previous attempts of using the WPML troubleshoot options (clear cache wp, sync navigation menus, fix post types, etc. etc) sometimes fix the issue within 3-5 minutes and it looks like it works but after 30 minutes (or so) the issue comes back.
Your test menu is still there but all menus are in English and the other languages do not have any in the dropdown menu yet still show that they should have 11 each.
I do not feel that restoring a backup will resolve this situation since it happened after a recent WPML update (last week) and will happen again if we apply it.
This is odd. When I selected the menu that I created yesterday, all menus showed up again. Not sure what's causing this. Did you do anything before this happened? Also, are you able to clone the site to another staging site so that I can troubleshoot this further for you?
Strange indeed as this is the 4th time it has happened.
Nothing was done on menus or on WPML. Sometime within 30 minutes of doing the WPML troubleshooting procedures, the issue comes back.
The staging web site (staging.clicdata.com) is being prepared as it is over 1GB it is taking longer than usual. Will keep you posted however it will be the same user name and password.
I've tested the navigation menu on the staging site, and it appears to be functioning properly. Are there any specific steps I should take to reproduce the issue, or should we simply wait for it to occur?
It's been half an hour now, and the navigation menu continues to function without any issues. It seems like the problem may be specific to your end for some unknown reason. Could you kindly conduct a complete backup and carry out a conflict test, following the instructions outlined here: https://wpml.org/faq/checklist-before-opening-a-ticket-in-wpml-support/#4-is-a-theme-or-a-plugin-causing-a-conflict ? This should help determine if any themes or plugins are causing conflicts. My suspicion is that the problem may be related to your cache plugins. Please keep me updated on your progress.
The staging is a complete replica of production with all plugins so if there was a conflict it would happen in staging as well. The configuration is exactly the same and both web sites are untouched since the staging was created earlier today.
The web site has been in production for over 5 years with the same thee and WPML and the same plugins so I doubt very much that the theme and/or plugins are incompatible, additionally because I have no plugins that touch or use the menu. WPML is the only plugin that affects the menus and this is clearly a multilingual issue as its the filtering of menus per language that eventually and randomly messes up.
I will gladly do any testing in the lice web site but it needs to make sense especially because this issue takes some time to appear and I can't have our main sales lead generation web site not function properly by disabling such important things like the theme.
I can of course put staging up to production seeing that if the issue is not happening in staging (not fully proven yet), I can then move it completely to production but again this makes no sense since staging is an exact copy of production.
On the cache point, I think it is a very valid one, and one thing that we are not testing is the fact that staging is not being used at all.
At this time, I prefer if we let staging on for a few more hours and revisit tomorrow morning my time as it does not make sense that staging would not exhibit the same issue.
Staging still working normally.
Production still broken.
Have submitted a support ticket to the hosting provider (WPX) to see if they can help me.
Thanks for your support so far, in the meantime if you have any ideas or other customers reporting similar behaviour I would appreciate any or all help.
Hi Kor. Please see below the response from WPX (hosting provider). Let me know if anything here makes sense or if it helps.
I personally do not think this is the issue but….
Upon investigating the issue, it seems that there is a compatibility issue
between the WPML plugin and the theme/builder used on your website.
The error message suggests that a function [ icl_get_languages() ] required by WPML is not defined,
which can affect the proper functioning of the theme or builder,
particularly in handling multilingual content.
In order to resolve this issue,
we recommend reaching out to the developers of the theme/builder and WPML plugin
to report the compatibility issue.
They should be able to provide guidance
or updates to ensure that both components work seamlessly together.
I'd like to note that both the "bb-plugin" and "bbpowerpack"
were updated a few days prior to the emergence of this issue.
Here is the error message as well which I will advise to provide to WPML and theme/builder support:
