Why Community Translation Can't Scale for WordPress Themes and Plugins
Our analysis of 60,000+ WordPress plugins and themes shows community translation covers under 5% of needs in 40 languages.
WordPress 5.0 (a.k.a. the Gutenberg version) is approaching. We highly recommend postponing this update in your production sites until January.
What’s Coming With WordPress 5.0?
The main (and huge) change in WordPress 5.0 is the editor. Instead of TinyMCE, we’re getting Gutenberg. Until now, Gutenberg used to be a plugin (as I’m writing this post, it still is). However, it is getting merged into WordPress 5.0.
Once you switch to WordPress 5.0, the editor that you’re using now will be retired and completely replaced by the new Gutenberg editor.
Here is how the new editor looks like and how to translate content with it:
Will I Benefit From It?
Long term, we’re sure that WordPress and everyone using it will greatly benefit from this new editor.
However, for the next few weeks, and especially when dealing with existing sites, the drawbacks are bigger than the benefits.
Gutenberg is certainly a cool new editor, but it’s a completely new thing to WordPress. This means that a lot can break at the beginning.
Is WPML Compatible With WordPress 5.0?
We’ve been testing and updating WPML for Gutenberg compatibility in the last few months. Every time a beta or release candidate (RC) of WordPress came out, we retested everything and made the necessary changes to be compatible.
Unfortunately, Gutenberg is still not stable enough for full integration. Since it’s changing between each release (including the release candidates), there’s a chance that new compatibility issues will arise with the upcoming WordPress 5.0 release and with every subsequent 5.x update.
Of course, we will do our very best to keep up with these changes. When we can fix things ourselves, we do that immediately. Sometimes, we need tiny changes from Gutenberg side. Mainly, we may need new filters and hooks. Right now, we are facing several issues that will not work until addressed in WordPress:
- Translations of Gutenberg Reusable Blocks are not displayed
- Gutenberg Latest Posts block displays posts in all languages
- Gutenberg blocks created using ACF 5.8 are not translatable
WPML enjoys a large development team, so we can keep up with these rapid changes. Not all plugins and themes have this capacity, so it may take a little longer to adjust to Gutenberg.
When Will Be a Good Time to Update?
December is holiday season for almost everyone. Unless you’re missing an adrenaline shot, there’s no point in doing a major update right now. A fun trip to an adventure park with friends and family will cost less and be less stressful and you’ll get the same rush.
We’ll be updating our production sites to WordPress 5.0 on January, assuming that from today and until January we’ll see only one release of WordPress and it will go out smoothly. This is the first time since our launch that we’re holding off updating our production sites to new WordPress versions.
