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Good afternoon,
After switching from PolyLang (unsupported) to WPML (apparently fully supported), I’m more than disappointed by the shortcomings of this combo! To be very bland: it’s a marketing lie!
a) one of the major (uncommunicated) conditions: the primary language must be English. The minute you change WPML for the customer’s primary language (in this case, German), the whole thing is messed up!
b) This includes running the customer’s account in this primary language. Instead of giving him the comfort to handle the backend in his native language, one of the most important features will stop working: Booking via the backend and keeping track of his bookings in the (ok, beta) new calendar view. The reason being, other than the accommodation types, the accommodations themselves are neither translated nor universally available in any language. E.g., there are no accommodations that can be booked if you’re working in any other language than English.
c) The same shortcoming applies to reviews. The reviews can’t be translated, which leads to the ridiculous situation that the ratings, both in amount and quality, can fall apart depending on which language one chooses. The correct way would be to collect all reviews in one pool (no matter the language) and present the ones from the respective language while still doing the summation for the number of reviews and the average star ratings on the whole amount of reviews. Already the fiction of having reviews for any accommodation type is bonkers. If you ask for cleanliness, staff, location, etc. (just apply the booking.com criteria), it doesn’t make a difference if you stayed in a single or a double room, a cottage, or an apartment.
On a side note: for our application, I wrote an extension plugin that will put all reviews under one accommodation type and present them under any language. More: As we mirror the reviews from other platforms (where they have real value to help other potential customers decide) like booking.com, HolidayCheck, Yelp, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and the like, I added an editor to the backend to manually add the reviews from these platforms (automated import is on the to-do list).
I find it highly irritating to boast about WPML as a fully supported multilingual solution and decline support and development on Polylang (which I personally consider superior, not only pricewise but technically as well) while WPML is still that limited.
Kindly consider either an improvement on WPML methods or, even better, providing a universal translation layer that would enable the use of other multilingual plugins, esp. Polylang instead of a hard-coded WPML implementation only.
best regards,
Stefan Kremer
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