Polylang Polylang Pro introduced the ability to duplicate the content from an original post to a new translation. The version 2.2 later introduced the possibility to synchronise translated posts and make sure that they always display the same content. With the time, we received a lot of requests either to copy or synchronize posts in bulk, a feature that we are glad to deliver in Polylang Pro 2.4. This comes with a new bulk action in the posts list table which, after you selected the original posts, allows you to select the target language(s) and proposes you to bulk copy or synchronize your posts.
A few months ago, we received a very interesting pull request from Jory Hogeveen. He brings to us a better visibility of widgets dislayed in only one language by displaying a flag in the title bar. Thank you very much to Jory for this nice feature.
The ability to use custom flags is present since the early versions of Polylang. But we received several requests for a better flexibility. Thanks to a refactor and the introduction of new filters, it’s now possible to store custom flags in a ‘polylang’ folder of a theme or a child theme. It’s also possible to use SVG flags beside PNG and JPEG which were already available.
We usually take the opportunity of new versions to work on the compatibility with third party plugins. Polylang Pro 2.4 will improve the compatibility with the plugin Admin Columns. We have made our tests with both the free and Pro versions.
We are working hard for several months to prepare the big event of the year 2018 which will be the arrival of Gutenberg in WordPress 5.0. We also started to receive questions about the compatibility of Polylang with Gutenberg. So here is a short summary of the current status:
A significant refactor has been made in the core of Polylang to prepare this arrival. Indeed a lot of features such as the sychronizations were available only in the WordPress backend and we needed to make them available to the REST API calls which are used by Gutenberg to save its data. We also introduced new REST API fields to expose synchronized posts.
However most of the visible work has been made outside Polylang in a feature plugin called Polylang with Gutenberg, available on GitHub. This plugin needs Polylang Pro 2.4 beta 1 to work. It introduces a new Gutenberg sidebar panel to replace the Languages Metabox. A lot of work has already been done but there are still broken features, such as the import of the original content to a new translation or the ability to correctly filter parent pages by the current languages. These issues need work on the Gutenberg side to be fixed. We are working with the Gutenberg team and hopefully everything’s will be ready for WordPress 5.0. You can follow the status of the actions needed on Gutenberg side. It is also not yet possible to select existing posts as translation as it’s possible in the autocomplete input fields of the Languages metabox.
Polylang Pro 2.4 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 for November, 12th.
Picture illustrating the article by Heejin Jeong and licensed under CC0 Public Domain.