I have not a bug, but a really simple situation, which, I believe, have a lot of sites built on both your plugins.
Let's say:
- I have EN and DE versions of the website
- primary language is EN
- I have some objects, like... let's say Topic and messages connected to topic. Or messages and other messages as reply to other messages. Simple user features.
- so, no I have a huge problem: if my user of German version added some Topic in German, the same user have and all other users have no possibility to add any messages (nor EN, nor DE) to Topic until somebody will translate it to primary language...
This looks really strange to me.
Could you explain how this simple situation could be solved for now?
From my point of view there is only solution like no use Relationship feature at all and connect Messages to Topics by post id field. But it is strange not to use one of the most powerful features of your plugin.
Another option is not using WPML for Message or Topic translations, but use repeating field or some special post type for translating Message and Topic fields. Which also strange due to a lot of useful features in WPML in general.
So, for me it looks really strange that for no there is no option to connect secondary language posts if there is no primary language content. In my opinion this is more like a critical logical bug, not just missed feature. Because add some related content in not primary language just natural for any multilingual user-generated content website.
I will appreciate if you include possibility to have not primary language content relationships by using your plugins functionality.
I've seen this once before since we moved to Types 3 and the new relationships, with support for WPML.
With Types 2 where you created post relationships, you had to manually manage the connections of translated posts yourself, which required quite a bit of effort.
Types 3 improved upon this by making the connections automatic, but the issue you describe is a side effect.
Now that I have another report about this, let me raise it at our weekly meeting on Thursday where the whole dev team is present and see what we can do about this.
So I'll put this on hold and write back to you afterwards, if that's okay.
I discussed this with the development team this morning.
In Types 2 you had to manage relationships in different languages manually, which was effortful.
Types 3 significantly improved upon this by managing multilingual relationships automatically.
But it does so via the default language, and that is pretty much hard-wired into Types and WPML by design. I don't think your use case was considered when this was planned.
It means that it would very difficult to change, and in the context of the development priorities it was agreed that we would not.
However, a Types developer has an idea for a workaround that you could use with some custom code (that you would need to adapt to your needs).
He has added a task to take a look at that when he has some time.
I can't say when, but the details are all logged, and when I hear back from him I'll share what he suggests.
Thanks a lot for the update.
It's a pity to hear that this issue is difficult to fix and you don't plan to do it. I'm sure this is big issue now for most of UGC multilingual sites.
Anyway, I will appreciate any suggestions and update regarding custom code or any other way to help in this case.
And regarding future updates in general - do you have any public roadmap plans? It will be great to know what is planned and then to make our own development plans accordingly.
I haven't heard back from the developer with any suggestions yet (I sent a reminder on Friday), I'll let you know when I do.
We don't have a published roadmap, I'm afraid. We normally re-evaluate development priorities as each dev cycle begins, and what seemed like pressing issues two months ago can change by the time we are ready to begin work on new features. A roadmap would give a false sense of certainty about what was upcoming.
I'll leave this thread open until I have some feedback from the dev in question.
Thanks for update.
I think there is also related issue with repeatable fields group. I find that it is not only possible to add repeatable fields group to post, which have main language translation, but it is also possible to manage (add, edit,delete) repeatable fields group only in default language post view. Which is even less convinient then relationships, which is possible to manage in post translations.
I'm not sure about development connections between Toolset team and WPML team, but I have some idea - probably it is possible not just solve these issues at all, but as minimum create some "hidden" or "unpublish" default language post version with empty content (or just publish it with content copy) in the same moment as save new non-default language post version. This way it could be available all relationships and repeatable groups features even for non default languages for UGC sites.
Let's say like this:
- if this post don't has default language version, then by saving it let's create empty or full copy in the default language first
- if this post has default language version, then do nothing.
There are a lot of small details, but I believe they all manageable.
I don't have any news, but I'm just changing the status to escalated, as I'm waiting to hear back from the developers.
When I shared your observation that the current implementation also affects repeatable field groups and means you cannot add repeatable field groups in a secondary language that prompted them to agree that they need to think harder about this, but they are not done thinking yet.
No need to reply, I'll let you know when they have some concrete thoughts to share.
There is a lot of development work going on with several new projects at the moment, and to be honest I don't see this being prioritised anytime soon because of the other demands on the development team.
The next major release of Types will allow to completely separate between post relationship and translation. You will be able to create related posts in any of the site's languages and not only in the default language. We are aiming to release this major version in mid May (2020). When there's a beta version, we'll write about it in our blog and send email newsletters to all clients, inviting to try it out.
We have a minor update of Types that was published today. The major update of Types that includes changing how relationships work with WPML is nearing completion, we had a demo just this morning of the database migration that is required.
I don't have an ETA, but aside from urgent bug fixes it is the main task of our lead Types developer at the moment, and the bulk of the work is done. Sorry for the wait, but we are getting there.
