December is finally here and everyone is getting ready for the holidays and the New Year, so this won’t be a huge update.
The new editor for WordPress is out. We highly recommended postponing the WordPress 5.0 update (the Gutenberg version) in your production sites until January.
This is a holiday season for many people so it’s better to enjoy this time of the year with friends and family. Enjoy the fun rather than rushing a major update now.
WPML plans for 2019
After the release of WordPress 5.0, which followed our release of WPML 4.1.0, we spent the following days fixing some issues reported by users. At the same time, we included some additional features in the development of 4.2.0, which we’ve decided to release around the end of January.
The main features of 4.2.0 are ready, but we are taking this opportunity to polish and make some adjustments because of some usability issues.
We are also planning to release the new version of WooCommerce Multilingual which will bring two user-requested features:
- Custom currencies for payment gateways
- Custom currency settings for WooCommerce Product Add-On “Custom prices”
Believe it or not, we have also started planning for WPML 4.3.0 and 4.4.0.
WPML 4.3.0 will focus on user requests. Some long-standing requests, as well as new ones, will be addressed in this version, which we plan to release shortly after WPML 4.2.0.
WPML 4.4.0 will focus mainly on some additional changes to improve the experience for translators, especially when dealing with translation services.
During the development of 4.2.0, 4.3.0 and 4.4.0, we will also continue to improve the experience of our Advanced Translation Editor. So far, we have made some big improvements to the editor to support a larger number of clients and to make the waiting time for processing jobs 10 times shorter.
We also added a limit for Machine translation usage with the possibility of purchasing additional words.
You can follow all the latest news on our WPML Blog.
Toolset Update
During this last month, the community finally released the new Gutenberg editor for WordPress, and Toolset walked that path with them.
Views, Forms and Maps led the way forward, with new and dedicated blocks for Gutenberg, and visual hints when using the shortcodes in already existing content.
Types joined by providing a switch to let you jump from the classic to the new editor, so you can play with it before setting it as your default one.
It has been a long month, full of testing on every beta and on the final release of WordPress 5.0 and beyond. Besides our work the new Gutenberg editor, we still continued doing maintenance as usual.
Toolset Plans for 2019
We have important plans for next year, and some of them will start early in January:
- Our Toolset Dashboard will be much more visual and easy to use.
- We are in the final stages of development for a new drag & drop editor for Forms, which will make it much easier to create or style a form.
- Access is going to see some internal changes that will make it more flexible and easy to maintain, and that will translate into a new release solving some bugs and bringing its own integration with the new editor.
- Layouts will improve its editor with more visual clues about its cells and their content.
Finally, we want to help shape the future of the new WordPress editor, so we will be contributing to some specific areas like templates, and block attributes values and their sources.
You can follow all the latest news on our Toolset Blog.
Supporting our Customers
We launched Toolset & WPML Chat support last month and clients are now able to choose if they want to report issues in chat mode or in a ticket. We have managed to cut down the support waiting time and we also managed to reduce the time it takes from when a ticket is taken until it’s resolved for the 3rd month in a row.
And last but not least, we have added a service that helps us replicate clients’ sites much easier and faster. We hope this will further reduce the waiting time for clients who need our help
For 2019 our plan is to keep improving on all fronts. We will focus on feature requests and clients are invited to tell us what we are missing in our products:
We are training more supporters and we plan on reducing the time it takes to respond and resolve issues even further. On top of that, we’ll be making some more improvements to our support system UI.
Compatibility and Partnership Updates
We have released a new ACFML 1.0 version fixing some bugs.
We are improving our YouTube channel adding more videos, making sure partners share those and trying to find ways for it to be more effective
We also plan to work with more YouTubers. This month, we received a nice WPML review from WPLearning Lab.
We are also aiming at creating and facilitating positive relationships between our company and the many affiliate partners that promote our products.
A better version of our CRM will be deployed by using Hubspot and we are planning on launching it in January. The idea is to centralize our partnerships and make it available for anyone in the company needing the information.
Enhancements to ICanLocalize
In December, we improved pages for clients both on the public and account site. And as the Holidays are around the corner, we offered help to translate our clients’ promotional material in time before Christmas.
We also worked on improving our affiliate program pages and invited our new clients (as well as reminding our loyal clients too) to join it. Our customers can benefit from this program by referring their friends to us for translation jobs and earning 30% of what we make (our 20% earning from every translation job).
As for 2019, we are going to improve some of our project type pages for a smoother project setup process.
ICanLocalize Social
Our Spanish and French translators had a chance to participate in our new blog post about Spanish translations variants where we used their examples with names linked to their profiles.
Looking for a new job for the New Year?
Check out our jobs page and don’t hesitate to apply. You can read more about our culture on Remote.co
Thanks for reading…
And stay tuned for next year’s updates!
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