Polylang WordPress 5.0 introduces a brand new editing experience. Not only the old editor is replaced by a new block editor, but also all the old metaboxes are replaced by new side panels. Thus this new version greatly impacts a lot of plugins which are enriching the editor, add metaboxes, or modify the behavior of the WordPress metaboxes. This includes Polylang.
We are preparing the arrival of WordPress 5.0 for more than six months, not knowing when the final version would be released. When it was finally announced to be released on November 19, 2018, it was clear to us that we would not reach a full compatibility at this date. We thus decided to introduce the compatibility with WordPress 5.0 in 3 steps:
- The first compatibility step has been, almost transparently, introduced by Polylang 2.4. Indeed a lot of features such as the synchronizations were available only in the WordPress backend and we needed to make them available to the REST API calls which are used by the block editor.
- The second compatibility step is introduced by Polylang 2.5. The aim is to make Polylang usable with the block editor. It keeps the legacy metabox, using the metabox compatibility layer provided by WordPress 5.0, fixes most of the issues that we have detected during our tests and allows to duplicate the blocks for Polylang Pro users.
- The third compatibility step will come with Polylang 2.6 at the beginning of 2019 and will introduce a new sidebar panel which should allow us to fix the last glitches.
What are the known remaining issues with Polylang 2.5?
Working in Polylang Pro but not in Polylang:
- WordPress categories, post tags and page parents panels are not filtered by the current post language.
- New categories and post tags created from the editor are not assigned a language.
Specific to Polylang Pro:
- Activating the synchronization button and saving the post doesn’t refresh the translations fields of the languages metabox.
In both versions:
- The text direction is driven by the user interface instead of the post language.
- The page list provided to add a link in the block button is not filetered in the right language. Fixing this issue needs a new filter in WordPress which is currently planned for WordPress 5.0.1.
We just learned today that WordPress 5.0 will be finally released in two days, December 6. You can test the beta version of Polylang 2.5 as of today. Polylang Pro 2.5 beta1 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 the same day as WordPress 5.0.
Picture illustrating the article by SweetMellowChill and licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.