Polylang It is possible that most of the changes included in this new version won’t be visible to most users. The previous versions focused on new features. It is however as important to spend time to improve the plugin foundations.
The synchronization process of taxonomy terms and custom fields was designed quite a long time ago and was not well optimized. It was thus decided to completely refactor how these synchronizations are processed, focusing on the improvement of the performance. This work resulted in a noticeable decrease of database queries when saving posts, especially when having multiple custom fields. This of course applied to the synchronization of ACF Pro custom fields which has been partially rewritten too. This also allowed to fix an issue with the random header images. And while we were working again on ACF Pro, we took the opportunity to improve the compatibility with the clone field.
We also worked to improve the compatibility with cache plugins. As cache plugins don’t send the language cookie with the cached page, the cookie is now set in javascript when a cache plugin is active. Also the home page is automatically removed from the cache if you activate the browser preferred language detection. The test were made with WP Rocket, but the changes should apply to other cache plugins. A special case was handled for WP Fastest cache.
It is also important to note that Polylang won’t include translations files anymore. All old translations, unmaintained for more than 2 years, have been removed and all translations will now come from https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/polylang, when a language pack is available. Polylang is currently translated in 27 languages. This does not applies to translations specific to Polylang Pro which are still included with the plugin.
The final release is planned for the end of January. You can download the beta version of Polylang Pro 2.3 from your account. You can download the beta version of Polylang 2.3 from GitHub. Please report bugs on GitHub.
Picture illustrating the article by 12019 and licensed under CC0.