Background of the issue:
I am using WPML with WooCommerce on barryemons.nl to translate pages and products automatically. After resolving some initial issues with automatic translation, everything seemed to work fine. However, when I activated the translated version for visitors, I noticed that none of the products were visible on the front-end.
Symptoms:
When logged in as an admin, I can see all products on the front-end, but when not logged in as an admin, no products are visible. In the backend, everything is translated and the publishing status is good. Opening and saving a product without changes resolves the issue, but bulk quick updates do not. I manually opened and saved all 1400 products for English, but the same issue persists for French and German translations, which are currently disabled on the front-end.
Questions:
What is causing the translated products to not be visible on the front-end for non-admin users?
Is there a more efficient solution than manually opening and saving each product to resolve this issue for French and German translations?
I would like to request temporary access (wp-admin and FTP) to your site to test the issue.
(preferably to a test site where the problem has been replicated if possible)
**Before we proceed It is necessary to take FULL BACKUP of your database and your website. Providing us with access, you agree that a backup has been taken **
I often use the Duplicator plugin for this purpose: http://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/
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NOTE: If access to the live site is not possible and the staging site does not exist please provide me with a duplicator package created with the duplicator plugin.
1) When NOT logged in. Go to frontend in a certain product category in Dutch, here you see all products being assigned to the category.
2) When you then use the language switcher to thange the language to French or German, you will notice there are no longer products assigned to the category.
3) If you login as admin, you WILL see all products being connected. But that's only visible when logged in. If you logout again, you will no longer see the products.
All products are published and you can see them when you open their direct product links.
You can solve this, by opening a random not visible product in the backend, don't make any changes but save it directly. After this action, a product will then appear again in category page.
Based on this feedback "You can solve this, by opening a random not visible product in the backend, don't make any changes but save it directly. After this action, a product will then appear again in category page."
Also, If I access the product that is not showing when logged out directly it will show, meaning that the issue is not with the product not available or translated in the secondary language, rather it is missing the category assignment possibly. (still does not explain why it shows when logged in)
I would recommend the following:
1. Go to WPML-> Support -> Troubleshooting and run the following actions :
Select Products from the drop down _> Synchronize post taxonomies
Clear the cache
Unfortunately this action times out on the staging server.
2. If the above does not work please go to Products-> Bulk select and quick update
We tried that on live environment, this does not solve the problem. We tried different ways of bulk updating products, but this doesn't seem te hit the right trigger. (you could try this on staging environment yourself aswell.) Only opening / saving seemed to work.
After reviewing this issue, we found that it stems from the plugin WooCommerce Wholesale Prices.
Deactivating this plugin resolves the issue.(you can test by deactivating the plugin)
WooCommerce Wholesale Prices plugin has a feature that limits products to be seen by specific roles.
At the moment we are trying to find a possible way for you to resolve this quickly. One way is to re send the products for automatic translation as when I have test this it worked great.
Will update you shortly with a proposed way to move forward. In the meantime please review and see if you can understand if theres a global setting with that specific plugin that would cause this behavior.
After further discussion what we'd recommend is sending these products to automatic translation as mentioned above.
This will ensure that the data is shown correctly without interfering with your database.
Any other steps require extensive database work which we cannot guarantee that would work properly and could potentially cause bigger issues.
I have done some tests and sending the products for that category to translation works very well, and due to translation memory you are not paying twice for the translation. (there was a minor credit usage most likely to newly found items but nothing close to re doing the translations)
