WPML 2.4.1 fixes a few bugs and also adds a highly anticipated new feature. Finally, your posts and pages can have the same name in different languages.
This time, the bugs list is relatively modest. We changed the logic in some places to allow large sites with many users to run with less memory. WPML loaded the entire table of users and posts in several odd places. This is no longer the case and now much less memory is needed on these specific Admin pages. This was something that we actually found on our own site, as it grows bigger and busier every day.
Other bugs were related to language redirect cookies for Safari, better styling for the language switcher in menus, translation for author descriptions and the title of our own languages widget.
And now, for the really fun stuff…
Duplicate post names (slugs) for different languages
I think that this has been the most frequently requested feature, starting with WPML 0.9.3. Now, you can have pages like:
- /blog/
- /es/blog/
- /de/blog
It’s especially important when pages receive the names of products. Then, you really don’t want to have something like:
- /sony/
- /es/sony-2/ (ouch)
For a while now, WPML resolved first the language and only then the post. This fix hooks to the WordPress function that adds the integer suffix and changes it so that it too only checks for pages in the same language.
If you want to rename existing content in your site, simply edit the slugs. WordPress will now permit having translations with the same name and slug.
Please note that duplicate slugs are available for ‘posts’ only (pages, posts, custom post types) and not for taxonomy.
Custom Types and Fields Plugin
In case you’re interested, we haven’t completely forgotten about our plugin for managing custom types and fields. In fact, it’s ready for release. We’re just ironing out a few last issue with the new website and it’s up. I’ll write all about it in the next post.