Polylang Let’s imagine that you have to manage a site for US and UK. Some pages may be different for both countries – for example a store’s directory or local news – but it could happen that some pages could be the same for both countries – for example a documentation page or global news. In this latest case, the duplicated content feature introduced in Polylang Pro 1.9 already allows to copy the content from one page to the other at the page creation. But if, for whatever reason, the original page is modified, the changes are not propagated to the translations. That’s an issue for multi-regional sites.
Polylang Pro 2.1 will introduce the post’s synchronization feature. If you decide to synchronize two posts, the modification of one post will be propagated to the synchronized translation. In the picture below, the English (UK) and English (US) posts are synchronized, while the French post is independently translated:
This allows to have a post to appear exactly the same in several languages. However the feature is compatible with translated taxonomies. It means that two synchronized posts could display different taxonomy terms if these terms are translations of each other. The feature is also compatible with the automatically translated gallery shortcode and with ACF Pro fields which are automatically translated (image, file, post object, gallery and relationship fields).
After the integration of Advanced Custom Fields Pro introduced in 2.0, Polylang Pro 2.1 will integrate with Custom post type UI, allowing you to create custom post types and custom taxonomies and translate their labels all from your WordPress admin without writing a line of code. Several changes were made to improve the compatibility with other plugins including Yoast SEO, Jetpack and WooCommerce.
A visible change for everybody is the Languages menu which has been moved at top level. The Polylang settings and strings translations are now accessed more rapidly. However, the main motivation of this change was to allow developers to modify the needed capability to access the strings translations page (currently accessible only to administrators). This is achievable with a few lines of codes as demonstrated in the example given on GitHub.
Polylang Pro 2.1 beta 1 can be downloaded from your account. The free version is available on GitHub. Please test it and report bugs on GitHub. The plan is a final release at the end of January.
Picture illustrating the article by Leonardo Barbosa and licensed under CC0 Public Domain.