Hello, we have noticed that some products that have variations in the main language (English) do not have the same in our secondary languages such as French (one product has no variation at all) or Spanish (this one has variations, but not the same number of variations).
In another product, the translation of our attributes has disappeared in the secondary language...
This is an example of a product that has multiple variations in English: hidden link
If you edit in the main language: hidden link
you will see these variations: hidden link
But in the French editing screen: hidden link
You can see that the number of variations is unrelated and that there are many more than expected...: hidden link
Please help as our product catalogue is not making any sense now in the secondary languages.
Thank you. hidden link
I can provide login info and we have made a backup copy.
Welcome to the WPML support forum. My name is Nicolas and I will be happy to help you today.
Do you know when this error occurred? From your debug info file I think it could be two things:
1) WP All import
It could be an issue related to the importation of products.
Here is our documentation: https://wpml.org/documentation/related-projects/wpml-all-import-plugin-website-import-with-wpml/
The important thing is to import first the original language with an unique identifier and then import one separate file per language (using this unique ID to link the translation to the original language).
This issue as been solved in v4.5.8 and I can see that you already updated it.
- Could you please try to edit your original product (just add a space at the end of a paragraph) and re-save it
- Try also to resave your permalinks in "Settings > Permalinks"
If the issue is not solved after that, please make a full backup of your site before we try some troubleshooting options:
- Go to "WooCommerce > Status > Tools (tab)"
- Look for "Regenerate the product attributes lookup table" and click the button "Regenerate" at the right
Hello Nico, thank you for helping out.
We have followed what seems to be the correct procedure with WP ALL IMPORT (as also validated with them):
1) We create variations in main language on WC product edit screen
2) We export these variations (with their unique ID)
3) We fill in the data that we need to add on a spreadsheet (this means that we insert the price and the dimensions L/W/H for each variation)
4) We then import back the variations (with the same unique ID of course) so that the fields (price and dimensions L/W/H) are updated
5) This will automatically give us also the right variations in the secondary languages, we do not us WP ALL IMPORT on the secondary languages...
So we are not doing like your suggestion: hidden link
but this way works fine and wpallimport approved it. We don't have the need to import successively in English (main) and then French and Spanish (secondary languages) as all we need to update are price and dimensions and this is done via the main language.
Now we are seeing that some products have more variations in the secondary language ==> we have run the option "Orphaned variations
This tool will delete all variations which have no parent." but it seems to have only found 74 orphaned variations while there are many more..
We have also applied your recommended fix (Product lookup tables
This tool will regenerate product lookup table data. This process may take a while.) but nothing has changed, we still have orphaned or incorrect product variations in the secondary languages.
It would be best to either have a chat session with you or provide login details to you.
After trying the fixes you suggested, the variations issue is still there, we had this situation:
hidden link
this is the main language, it had 288 variations.
The French version had 537 variations and the Spanish version had 441 variations.
We have deleted all the variations in the English version hoping to at least try to import again but we see that there still remain the following variations in the
French version: 537 (no change)
Spanish version: 176 (there are less).
As mentioned before, we did not create manually the variations in English, French or Spanish.
We just created them on the woocommerce product page (using the function that will combine available attribute values) in English, then exported them, completed the data and imported them back (always with the same unique ID and in English). Normally, the system will automatically create the same number of variations in the secondary languages, they will have a different unique ID but they are normally correctly linked together. Not in this case, we do not know what might have caused this anomaly and discrepancy in variations between languages.
Hello,
YEs, at this stage I think it will be better if you could provide me with a temporary admin access (wp-admin) – preferably to a test site where the issue has been replicated – so I can further investigate.
I will activate a private field for your next answer where you can provide that information safely (this field is only visible by you and the support team). Don't share your own admin account, create a new one that you will delete when we finish troubleshooting.
IMPORTANT: Before we proceed, please backup your site and database.
I will try other troubleshooting options to synchronize your attributes and variations. That's why the backup (or even better the staging site) is important.
Due to our url structure chosen when implementing WPML, we use "subdomains", for each language, this is confusing for any hosting service but the main problem is that no hosting service (we use WP Engine, normally one of the best available) can set up a staging environment with multiple languages using a subdomain url structure.
So, long story short, you have access to our production environment and we have made a full backup.
Merci
Thanks for providing me access to your site. I tried to run some troubleshooting options to synchronize attributs and variations made out of attributes. But unfortunately this will work only with WooCommerce attributes not with custom attributes created in the product itself.
Could you please register those attributes (Sambatra table dimensions, Sambatra table top, Sambatra stand material) and their terms as WooCommerce attributes (in "Products > Attributes")
Then we can either run again the troubleshooting options or we can delete the translations and re-do them from scratch.
Hello Nico,
Thank you for your reply.
WP ALL IMPORT support has validated that we could create attributes using the product editing screens (what you call "custom attributes") and then use them for variations between combinations of the values of each attributes.
This is the way we have always worked with Woocommerce variable products. WP All import seems to have no issue with working that way. I would prefer to avoid creating dozens of attributes via the option you are proposing which we have so far used only to create attributes that will go to the rich snippet data later on (brand and reseller).
According to the WP ALL IMPORT plugin support the "custom attributes" can be used to create variations and then exported/imported as we will describe below.
Can we rather do the following?:
These are the product IDs that are posing an issue (variations seem to have disappeared or are not matching across different languages):
In the main language, here are our product ID's (parent product):
20987 ==> we can use keep using this one as our example and for testing a solution
21010
41313
50861
21177
40910
41103
We could do the following using product 20987 and replicate the issue or see if it is solved:
Please check the procedure I suggest to replicate the situation in this file: hidden link
It would probably be best to use a chat function to communicate if that were possible.
I am not sure which tasks you would like us to do and which you will do.
Please contact us and we can hopefully do this together.
We are on Lisbon time.
Best Regards,
Hello Nico, we have been thinking about your proposed use of how to create attributes, this would simply not work as we then would have dozens upon dozens of attributes lying around there when they are specific to a product only (even if they have the same name such as "dimensions" or "table top", the values per product will be different).
In any case, WP All Import showed us a way to retrieve and manage the customised variations by using this in the EXPORT settings:
Please have a look
1) hidden link
2) this is the detail for one of those fields: hidden link
Thank you for the detailed document. Could We try to delete the translations for that specific product and translate it again?
- Go to "Products", then use the language switcher in the top admin bar to switch to Spanish.
- Found that product in Spanish and delete it permanently (move to trash AND empty trash).
- Then switch back to English and create the Spanish translation again.
Hello Nico, we have deleted the Spanish version as you have proposed, deleted the trash and now we will proceed to create the Spanish version again. We will keep you updated.
I imagine that we will have to do the same with the French version once we have validated that this method works to fix the issue? It would be also essential to define the right procedure (or understand what went wrong). Step by step, let's see how this works first, thank you for your support!
Hello again, we have created the Spanish version again, we seem to have the same amount of variations as in the English version now, that is looking good!
We are now extracting the variations in Spanish (there are 540 in total) so we can check that the data within is correct.
After that, if you agree, we can do the same procedure with the French version of the product..
In total this crazy situation has impacted seven products... I imagine we would need to do the same for each of them.
Hopefully we can understand what went wrong as normally our method and procedure is correct.
Please tell us quickly if we can also correct the French version and then correct the other problematic products too.
Hello again, as the Spanish deletion and then recreating it has worked, we have done the same for the French version of the product, also it is now correct, we have the same amount of variations across all three language versions of the product and they are consistent.
Here is the url to the product edit page if needed: hidden link
Can we proceed to do the same with the 6 or 7 other products in the same situation?
Thank you.
That's great news! Yes you can proceed with the other products.
Now regarding the issue itself and the cause. WordPress 6.0 changes introduced some issues with taxonomies (as I mentioned in my first answer) so it could have affected your site at some point before the update to WPML v4.5.8.
Our troubleshooting options (as well as WooCommerce tools) will work with WooCommerce attributes but it seems that because your attributes were custom attributes specific to this product it didn't help here.
I'm glad not all our products were affected and that we finally found a solution.
Thank you,
Nico
The topic ‘[Closed] Variations in secondary languages are incorrect or missing’ is closed to new replies.
