OTGS April News

April 29, 2019

This month we are proud to announce a brand new way of building Toolset-based sites that will allow our customers to produce beautiful designs with the full power of Toolset.

We released the new Toolset Blocks – our new Integration with the Block Editor which allows building beautiful sites with dynamic content without using code or shortcodes.

More Toolset News

We released the first beta for our Toolset Blocks project on April 10th, which aims to ease the creation and maintenance of sites by using the new WordPress Block Editor. The development team was busy working on this first working version which lets you create full templates for your Blocks-powered site.

We received a lot of valuable feedback which will continue guiding our work over the next few weeks. Thank you to all who gave us feedback so far.

Not only have we released Toolset Blocks this month, but we have also been working on a number of other updates with big plans for May and June:

Access had a major code refactoring for general optimization and performance improvements in its last release.

Types is completing a round of tests and the next major version, to be released very soon, will include the first iteration of our integration with the WordPress REST API (apart from a number of bug fixes and small enhancements).  

Forms had a number of small hotfix releases that will continue happening every one or two weeks until a major new version comes out. We are finishing a much requested new feature: the ability to use the WordPress media manager on media fields in frontend forms, so rich metadata for files can be set, and multiple files can be selected at once for repeating media fields.

Views is getting a bugfix release with incremental fixes and small enhancements being completed in the last and coming weeks, but under-the-hood we, are working on a complete review of the way Views interacts with the new Block Editor in WordPress. We should have a proper alpha preview for this in the coming weeks.

We redesigned the Learning Resources page on Toolset providing a better and cleaner look. In this series of tutorials, you will learn how to develop your own sites using Toolset plugins and without writing any PHP. The tutorials are accompanied by live training sites.

April is not all about Toolset though, check out what else we have in for you:

WPML Update

In April, we released two major updates that will help our WPML customers.

  • We focused the first one mainly on letting users know that the next major version of WPML will stop supporting versions of PHP older than 5.6. This change is in line with the upcoming changes in WordPress as well as helping us solve some security issues with certain old libraries and allowing us to use a more modern code.
  • The second update addressed some performance improvements we have solved while troubleshooting the loading time issues in wpml.org.

Both releases also included some bug fixing.

We should be able to resume 4.3.0 development in the first half of May.

You can follow all the latest news on our WPML Blog.

Community

Our Founder, Amir Helzer, was interviewed by Nathan, a WP specialist from WP Builds. Amir and Nathan talked about “Making your WordPress Website Multilingual”. You can find interesting information about translating your site and the benefits of it on the WP Build podcast  (interview starts at 3.40 mins).

Also, two of our company members were our public “stars” this month. Our front-end developer, Kasia Janoska, was interviewed by Nelio Software as WProfessional of the month and also by Template Monster.

Our UX guru, Jakub Milczarek, was also interviewed by TemplateMonster.

The interviews are about the challenges they face working remotely and how they combine work and travel. They both talked about the projects they are working on for Toolset and WPML.

Why WPML is the most popular plugin for translating WordPress sites is something Nelio also writes about in this post: How Combining Nelio A/B Testing and WPML Can Help You Increase International Customer Conversions

Last but not least, we also took part in the Global Work from Home Day which was about promoting the benefits of flexible working and working from home. They reached 1.2 million people, 140 companies and over 20,000 employees were involved. We all celebrated working from home. We are a 100% remote working company and therefore more than happy to partner with Remote How in promoting working from home. We even took part in the e-book – you can sign up for and receive it.

Partnerships, Compatibility and more…

Since we launched this last year, WPML contractors became a strong marketplace. The potential behind this talented group of multilingual specialists was recognized also by our latest partner who joined our pool of contractors – Codeable, the #1 outsourcing service for WordPress. We warmly recommend Codeable to our clients who need to customize their multilingual site.

Translation partners

In April we successfully integrated four new Translation Partners: Linguarum, Transline Deutschland, MTLT (which also published a dedicated page about our partnership) and Versacom.

Other partners like Comtec, Lengoo, QuickSilver, which have been integrated with WPML for some time now, also created and published their own service page about the benefits of working with WPML and how they translate WordPress sites.

Enhancements to ICanLocalize

In April we made several important updates for clients who need to translate their websites:

  • We published a new video which helps clients easily start translating their WordPress websites using ICanLocalize with the WPML integration.
  • Our “Getting started” page for Website projects now includes step-by-step instructions and a new detailed video tutorial.
  • When sending WP content to ICanLocalize, clients can now select each time which jobs they’d like to pay for:

For clients with Software applications, we improved YAML files parsing and upload. The file format list in the upload screen now has grouped file formats in order of popularity to make the file upload process easier. We are working to soon implement a feature that automatically detects the most common file formats for an even quicker project creation process.

Along with that, our Tutorials and Services pages are now fully available in five popular languages, namely English, French, German, Russian and Spanish.

In May, some of our plans are to release the new workflow of Document Translation projects and implement changes in the Software projects creation screens in accordance with the users’ feedback we collected in the past month.

Want to join us?

We are a 100% remote working company and all our employees work from over 40 countries worldwide. We do not mind where you work, just that you have great internet access, you work well in a team but can also carry out tasks independently.

You can read more about our company and culture on Remote.co.

Come Work With Us

Are you interested in working with a globally distributed team that encourages growth and advancement? Are you ready to harness the power of technology for a better future?