[Resolved] Menu synchronization not working properly

Thank you for contacting WPML support. While you are waiting for one of my colleagues to take this ticket and work on it, let me provide you with first debugging steps or if I can perhaps help with the issue quickly. Have you translated the pages before trying to translate the menu? If you are adding items as pages to the German menu, you will need to make sure that those pages have been translated or else there is nothing to add to the English menu.

For Custom Links, you can go to Appearance -> Menus and use the admin language switcher to switch to English. Then you should be able to see the English menus and edit them. Do you see any menus there? Are there custom links or pages added on the backend?

If the menu items are added as custom links, then they will not sync and you will need to add the links. This is becuase a custom link item does not know how to translate the link. It could link to essentially anything, even something outside your site. If you link to categories or pages instead of custom links, then the sync would work. Otherwise, you can use that admin switcher to switch language and add the custom links to your secondary language.

I would like to request temporary access (wp-admin and FTP) to your site to take better look at the issue. You will find the needed fields for this below the comment area when you log in to leave your next reply. The information you will enter is private which means only you and I can see and have access to it.

Our Debugging Procedures

I will be checking various settings in the backend to see if the issue can be resolved. Although I won't be making changes that affect the live site, it is still good practice to backup the site before providing us access. In the event that we do need to debug the site further, I will duplicate the site and work in a separate, local development environment to avoid affecting the live site.

Privacy and Security Policy

We have strict policies regarding privacy and access to your information. Please see:
https://wpml.org/purchase/support-policy/privacy-and-security-when-providing-debug-information-for-support/

**IMPORTANT**

- Please make a backup of site files and database before providing us access.

- If you do not see the wp-admin/FTP fields this means your post & website login details will be made PUBLIC. DO NOT post your website details unless you see the required wp-admin/FTP fields. If you do not, please ask me to enable the private box. The private box looks like this: hidden link

I can see the issue that is happening on the backend when I try to synchronize a menu. The next thing we will need to do is check for any backend errors by enabling the debug log. I will send instructions to do this below. The other thing to test is minimal settings, meaning test with only WPML plugins active with a default theme. Do you have a staging site where we can test that? If not, perhaps your hosting provider can create one for you, or you can use WP Staging or something similar. If that doesn't work, let me know and we can set one up for you and get a copy of your site to test there.

WordPress includes a debug mode that helps reveal PHP problems. Let's enable this and see if there are any errors we can locate.

To enable it, open your wp-config.php file and look for

define('WP_DEBUG', false);

Change it to:

define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false );

In this case the errors will be saved to a debug.log log file inside the /wp-content/directory.

The wp-config.php is located in your WordPress root directory. It’s the same file where the database configuration settings are. You will have to access it by FTP or SFTP in order to edit it.
If you open wp-config.php and that define statement is not there, you can add it right before this line:

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

Please note that you’ll see everything, not only related to our Plugins. This will most likely include messages from other plugins, your theme, and sometimes even WordPress core. The messages appear all over the place.
Sometimes they appear right on top, but they can also appear in the middle of the page.

DOC:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Debugging_in_WordPress

After enabling the debug mode, please try to replicate the issue. Navigate to the page where the error message being displayed. The errors will be either displayed on the screen or logged in the debug.log log file inside the /wp-content/directory.

Paste the latest lines here. No need to paste the entire log file, just 50 lines or so will do. Please censor any sensitive information.