Background of the issue:
I have a main site in German with English as a second language using its own domain. I manually translate pages in the admin by clicking the plus icon. This method works for almost all pages except the homepage. Both language versions of the homepage exist in the admin and are defined as the home page for their respective languages.
Symptoms:
The English homepage is just a copy of the German content, and any changes I make to it don't get saved.
Questions:
Why can't I independently translate the homepage in the secondary language?
Why are changes to the English homepage not being saved?
Also test if the same thing happens on a directory mode:
- IMPORTANT STEP! Create a backup of your website. Or better approach will be to test this on a copy/staging version of the website to avoid any disruption of a live website.
- Go to "WordPress Dashboard > WPML > Languages > Language URL Format".
- Check the "Different languages in directories" checkbox.
- Click the "Save" button.
- Go to "WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks".
- Click the "Save" button to flush the permalinks cache.
It seems that the issue is caused by the WPML string translation plugin and the setup. If I have string translation active, I can translate the secondary language frontpage, but as soon as I save the frontpage in the primary language, the content of the secondary page gets overwritten.
If I disable the WPML string translation plugin, then it works fine.
Anything else you can recommend to check? The same problem remains if I switch to different languages in directories.
Thank you very much. I searched our issue tracker and we have a report like the one you mentioned.
The workaround at the moment is to not publish the translated post before the original post.
So basically make sure you publish the original post first and then the translation.
I will inform you if there is a fix for this in the upcoming releases
Any indication on when this will be solved, it's a major issue as we can't reliably translate the frontpages. We need to be able to edit the frontpage in both languages!
I tried to get around it by not making the frontpages attached to each other, but then both of them redirect to the frontpage in the secondary language/domain.
Thank you for following up. We actually released an errata today which is most probably the same thing that you are experiencing regarding the String Translation plugin:
