As the summer is heating up in the Northern Hemisphere, so is the development of our plugins. We are on the verge of releasing two big updates for both Toolset and WPML.
Toolset News
During July, the Toolset team is completing some of the features we have been working on for the last two months, focused around multilingual sites that want to display rich information to a broad audience. Site owners and maintainers will also enjoy our improved editor support for right-to-left (RTL) languages.
Besides this, the upcoming release will greatly simplify the usage of post relationships. You will now be able to display content from related posts in literally a few easy clicks.
All of this is already available to Toolset clients through an open beta release.
In parallel, we are also close to finishing an important review for our compatibility layer with WooCommerce, which will empower users to design better product templates and archives with ease, and even display relevant lists of products.
Finally, we also completely revamped Toolset Documentation. There are now 3 complete courses for building the most popular types of sites: directory, membership, and business. And more are on the way, including the one about building custom WooCommerce stores. Also, there is a dedicated documentation archive page listing all the detailed topics with a search to find what you need. We hope all of this will help Toolset users easily find the right information when they need it.
To get more news, visit our Toolset blog.
WPML News
WPML 4.3.16 – We have completed most of the work for this release which not only resolves some integration issues with Toolset and Advanced Translation Editor but also includes a good number of other fixes and improvements.
We aim to release this version in the first half of August.
WPML 4.4.0 – This major release is nearing its completion.
We will soon release a public beta which includes most of the new features. Following betas, if not the final release, will include all the features and improvements such as:
- Complete integration with the Advanced Translation Editor
- Complete integration with Toolset
- Make sure that translation jobs are not messed up on cloned or copied sites
- An updated interface for translating strings, as well as streamlined workflow for creating translation jobs for strings
- A redesigned interface for managing admin strings
- A plugin recommendation feature which suggests optional WPML-compatible add-ons based on the active plugins and themes
These are the biggest features, but this version includes several more, and many came from clients.
The list is long, but it will be included in the release announcement.
Visit our WPML blog to follow all the latest news.
Compatibility
We published an SEO plugins comparison article “3 alternative WordPress SEO plugins that might surprise you“.
We have updated Avada’s language configuration file as they have released Avada 7.0. Additionally, we updated Avada’s documentation this week as its user interface has changed.
Also, we released Yoast SEO Multilingual 1.2.0, which includes bux fixes related to Yoast’s new Indexable features.
We added four new Gutenburg blocks plugins to our compatibility list and announced the compatibility on our social media accounts (FB & Twitter).
Affiliates and Partnerships
WPML and Toolset continued to be mentioned in some of the most popular blogs and websites in WordPress during July.
As part of our partnership, WPExplorer added Toolset to its list of the best Gutenberg plugins and featured us in an article on dynamic sliders. We also published another article on creating sliders and galleries on TorqueMag.
In addition, we are continuing our plans to publish Toolset-related articles on non-English speaking blogs. The German blog Search-One published a list of the best Gutenberg plugins and recommended Toolset at the top.
With WPML, we partnered with six of the most successful plugins in different fields including ElegantThemes, WP Rocket and WPForms to release a guide to how a business can build a successful website. Each one of the partners wrote an article on their area of expertise – WPML handled translation of course – and published it on their respective websites.
Translation partners
We started July with the integration of two new Translation Partners: Berba and AST Language Services.
Berba is a language provider from Bilbao, Spain and it’s already available in WPML to help you internationalize your business.
AST also announced compatibility with WPML. AST is a British Translation Service that brings accurate & professional translation to promote your message to your overseas customers.
Want to give any of them a try and make your site multilingual?
Very soon, the WPML user interface on your site will start prioritizing the list of all Translation Partners by the ones that belong to your own country. In this way you will know which Partners are closer to you if you need a more personalized service.
We also published an interesting Case Study of translations.com, one of our long-time partners, and how they improved their service by using WPML’s Translation Readiness Service.
If you are planning to translate your site with one of our Translation Partners, the Translation Readiness Service is free for you. So what are you waiting for? :)
Stay tuned to know more about new features and partners!
Support – Lots of good news!
We have moved completely to chat-first support, which means that most supporters are taking chats at all times and only a few supporters are taking tickets. As a result, our support efficiency rose by literally 100%.
We are in the process of onboarding three new supporters and making sure to have better coverage in later time zones as well as over the weekends.
We are finishing documentation improvements for how we reply to clients and publish errata. We’re also improving the support search system and the way we present information to clients when they need support.
We have also improved our internal performance evaluations and have a better understanding of which tickets need more attention.
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?