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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… Let’s continue:
Adding bookings only in the primary language also means that customers will receive all emails in the primary language. At this point it severely affects business and hampers communication with the customer.
MPBH only works fine in the default language URL format for WPML, e.g., different languages in directories (https://domain.tld/ – English, https://domain.tld/de/ – German). To mask the limitation of having English as the primary language, the “Use directory for default language” flag would help. But this will break the link for /my-account/bookings/
I seriously wonder if anyone from the development team has ever worked with this stuff or if testing is left to real-world applications?!
To add insult to injury, it just turned out even the caching support is limited to WP Super Cache, especially looking at the multi-currency add-on. MPBH is a one-trick pony that needs a serious overhaul!
I use WPML on around 8 MPHB websites. No problems whatsoever. Everything I want is translated. Sure, it takes some getting used to, and using the String Translation option, and changing some settings to make everything translateble, but works fine!
@ R. L.: Are you using MPHB in an environment as described above? E.g., English as a primary language, etc.? If not, I would like to learn from your experiences. Also: are you running those 8 websites for yourself or for customers (e.g., are you involved on a daily basis or “just” roll-out)?
Hi Stefan,
Thank you for your feedback. Perhaps you faced difficulties because you had used Polylang on this website previously. You can read this article to learn how to migrate from Polylang to WPML correctly https://wpml.org/documentation/migrate-polylang-wpml/.
Since the reviews are the transformed ‘Comments’, you can refer to WPML documentation to find a proper approach to translate the comments or display them on pages of other languages.
To submit a booking as an admin in another language, you can switch the language in your profile settings.
Feel free to contact us if you have any difficulties translating your booking site with WPML.@J. Davis, thanks for your reply.
a) I went strictly step by step according to the migration documentation. I can’t recommend using this tool at all! It seems for a reason that it’s not officially released on WMPL.org, but on GitHub only.
Because of the mess the migration left behind, I created a new site from scratch (!) to first set up MPBH completely before involving WPML for the translation. Being left with a staging version of this newly created site, I could play around, just to find all of the above-mentioned shortcomings of the MPBH/WPML combo to be confirmed:
b) Changing the primary language and/or “use of directory for default language” option will render MPBH completely dysfunctional (even after refreshing the permalinks!): no accommodations to be found, no bookings possible, no links working in the account page, … a complete mess! Luckily it’s reversible. Still, a site should reflect on its main audience by using the correct primary language. If, as in our case, the target audience speaks German, German should be the primary language and not to be found in a /de/ subfolder. Or at least be on the same level as the primary language, English. But as we learned, neither an /en/ subfolder nor the language switch can work.
c) Before tackling the translation of comments (which WPML does not offer!), the first flaw is to have them connected to individual accommodation types. At least a choice in the admin of “review accommodation” or “review hotel” should be possible. Right now reviews spread over several IDs, providing different numbers of reviews and averages. Maybe the whole approach of (mis-)using comments for reviews should be reviewed (no pun intended).
MPBH has a long way to go to be fully multilingual. As there is work needed anyway, I’m strongly advocating to make this work count and support more than just WPML and have a general translation layer to hook in PolyLang, WPML, and maybe even other multilingual solutions, if not abandoning WPML at all and switching to PolyLang as the preferred supported multilingual solution.
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