The Holiday season is always busy so we packed our December and January news into one post.
Toolset Blocks 1.4 is live with cutting-edge new features! We’re also in the middle of WPML 4.5.0 development which will introduce a whole new translation workflow. Plus, we have a whole new directory of WPML-recommended themes.
Toolset News
January has been a fantastic month for Toolset. After several weeks of development and almost a full month of testing, we released Toolset Blocks 1.4 including our biggest effort to expand Dynamic Sources (custom fields, WordPress fields, etc.) beyond our own blocks, and into WordPress core and most popular block plugins out there.
Watch this video to see these awesome Toolset features in action:
Together with this, you can now use fields inline in any block that provides a text input.
Next, we’re finalizing an alpha release focused on optimizing the way Toolset loads different assets and resources on the front-end. This will bring a nice performance boost which is what Google is starting to take into account from the coming May.
Finally, our team is already fast at work on the next release. In short, if you have a WooCommerce-powered site, you will love what is coming. ❤
To get more news, visit our Toolset blog.
WPML News
We had our first internal demo of two of the major changes planned for our planned WPML 4.5.0 release.
Our new WPML setup wizard is impressive and at the same time much simpler to complete: we have reduced the number of questions when setting up WPML for the first time.
The new translation workflow also received a huge facelift and new features that will allow users to automatically send content for translation and publish the jobs once completed.
Of course, it will also provide the option to review the jobs before publishing them. Once again, this means much fewer clicks and steps to handle translations.
We are also working on many other features planned in this release. This includes many changes related to compatibility with other plugins and themes.
We aim to release this new version around Spring 2021.
In the meantime, we have released WPML 4.9.0. It’s a minor update that fixed 28 bugs.
We are doing our very best to make it easy for you to build the multilingual sites that you need. Don’t miss this post on Multilingual WordPress sites in 2021 and drop your comment sharing with us what you’re hoping to see in 2021!
Visit our WPML blog to follow all the latest news.
Partnerships, Compatibility and Affiliates
Towards the end of last year, WPML launched a recommended plugin directory which provides clients with a range of WPML-compatible plugins they can rely on to build a multilingual site.
Well, guess what? We’ve just launched the same for themes. Our WPML-recommended theme directory is now available and highlights all sorts of different themes – from those with their own page builders to themes built specifically with WooCommerce in mind.
While it’s been great to strengthen our relationship with existing compatibility partners, we’ve also made some new ones. In December, WPML finalised a partnership with Crocoblock and Dynamic Content for Elementor, to support our interest in dynamic websites. We also finalized Toolset compatibility with two new themes: Hestia and Neve. In case you missed it, they wrote a great guest post for us on how to build a niche WordPress site using Toolset and Neve.
Speaking of compatibility, before Christmas we launched a new retesting dashboard on WPML. It allows our partners to log in and test their plugin or theme with WPML themselves. It’s been hugely successful so far and means our clients can always see which plugins or themes work well with WPML!
In December, we released several minor versions of our glue plugins to comply with WordPress 5.6 changes and we started deploying our “Compatibility Partner” dashboard. We’ll progressively invite more and more partners to use it. In January, we released WCML 4.11 which brings better support for WooCommerce REST API.
Lastly, our affiliates continued driving interest around both WPML and Toolset. One of our favourite articles from the last couple of months is this great comparison between Toolset and Advanced Custom Fields. We’re looking forward to seeing what the next month brings following on from our release of Toolset Blocks 1.4
Translation partners
We are glad to announce the new integration between WPML and Amplexor, a global translation service with over 1,500 employees in 40 offices across 22 countries working together as one team to serve clients wherever they are and in every language!
Our current partners are also very enthusiastic and always up-to-date regarding this ongoing partnership with WPML – and so are we! Our longtime partner AT-Language Solutions revamped their WPML page to make it easier for clients to connect with them.
On the other hand, from Indonesia, our partner GTE Localize shared their own page explaining ‘Why work with GTE Localize and WPML?’. If you are interested in translating with a partner from Indonesia, GTE might be the right choice.
We are constantly looking for new translation partners that bring the best of languages and WPML, so stay tuned for more news.
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