 And now we don't only have the chance to present different solutions, we have them live and in the shape of real people here, no less than four different makers or power users of multilingual solutions. Just before I let you speak, a little overview. Who of you speaks several languages? Who is multilingual? Yeah, a quite impressive majority. Who of you uses multilingual plugins or a multilingual plugin in WordPress? Good, so everybody knows what's about. No need to have some introductory words, I think. And who of you uses translation services inside WordPress? Yeah, a minority, but it will be interesting to talk about this today. First of all, let's make a round of introduction with those four gentlemen. We start from this side with Robert Windisch. Yeah, hi. I'm Robert Windisch from M-Side. We're doing the plugin called Multilingual Press, which is based on multisites. So it's a different approach than the other plugins. So we use the core function of multisite to enable people to connect languages and post with each other. Hi, my name is Pascal. I live in Fribourg in Switzerland, and we are a web agency. Our name is Ethos Digital, and we use a lot of VPML, so they asked me to represent them because they could not send somebody to be here today. Hello, I am Frédéric. I am the founder of Pridon, which is... Hello, I'm Remy. I'm here for Supertext via our translation agency, and we've built a plugin on top of his Polylang plugin so that you can order translations easier, quicker, and hopefully with less drama. And if we have to, we also use WPML, but basically we do prefer Polylang to put that out there in the beginning. My first question goes to the newcomer in the area of multilingual WordPress, which is Remy Blättler and Supertext. Now, in 2018, most of the known multilingual plugins have been working since years. They are somehow well-established, and we have seen new solutions which have come up. I didn't mention Augusta Prott of Weglot, who couldn't make it to attend this talk unfortunately, which is one of the newer solutions which have appeared recently. Supertext is also quite recent in the WordPress multilingual space. Why did you enter this market? Basically, I mean, we, as a translation agency, we have to go where our customers is. I know that's marketing speech, but we had more and more customers that were using WordPress. And it's, if you use WordPress and you have to work with a translation agency, you use to copy your WordPress blog post into a Word file with all the HTML code or without, both are painful. And we translate it in a Word file. You have to copy it back, you lose your formatting, and it's one big mess. So we had one customer that said, hey, we need a better solution, and we were sitting together with him, and then for some people in here, they might remember Blockwerk. And basically together with Blockwerk, we built that plugin, and the user base has been growing ever since. And currently, WordPress is our fastest growing integration with the content management system. So this is definitely for us the place to be. You do also work with other content management systems, like you have a solution that integrates with Drupal, and on the one that integrates with Type 3. That's correct, yes. I mean, with Type 3, we're just using the default import-export stuff. But for Drupal, we have basically an equal functionality plugin as for WordPress. You, representatives of three fully-featured, multilingual solutions, how do you see the evolution of the WordPress platform and ecosystem in the latest years? Have there been changes that have influenced the way your plugin works? Yeah, for us, the multi-site feature gets really much features every year. So it was introduced in WordPress 3.0, which is like, I think, 10 years ago or something like that, or nine years ago. So this was before it was a fork, so it is stable and gets feature every time in the WordPress universe. And there are also upcoming features for multi-site for giving a global admin and having more features coming to multi-site. So we are really appreciating what is done for the core that we can then leverage in our plugin. Well, I think for me, two points are important. Also, as a web agency, what we like in VPML, I mean, also for other plugins, but it's that you have very good integration. So VPML has worked very hard to have integration with WooCommerce, with DV, for example, to TenBuilder, and with a lot of teams. So it's very easy to bring things together and to be able to have a good development environment when you can do what you want to do. I think the other change that is coming is now this automatic translation, like with Wiglot. This is kind of the opposite of what you do. You do high-quality translation, and Wiglot do automatic translation. So in VPML now, in the version 4.0 of the new editor, you can use automatic translation as a tool to help you translate, to gain time, let's say. So it recognizes things you have translated, and you can not translate two times the same things. So it's interesting this integration with using high-end translator, but also to have the tools to be able to not lose time, to have a specific glossary for your terms, and to be able to integrate all this together to have the best from what the software is being able to do and what human beings are able to do. Yes, you are right. What we see is that the percentage of users who are using multilingual websites in WordPress is not growing in fact. Probably it's not the difficulty of using the tools, but the time they take to translate the text, which is very important and the working point. So the fact that we need to find tools to decrease the time to translate the text, is very important to attract more people and allow them to translate their site in multiple languages. For example, if you want to have a WooCommerce website to attract more visitors, more clients, then you need to translate it in several languages, but the time you take to translate all the articles and so on can be so long that it's very interesting to go back. So we need to provide this automatic translation tool, and then you can modify the translation. Yes, you can modify the automatic translation to improve it and have higher quality because today the automatic translation is not a good quality. So as you say, the workflow for the user, the ease of translating content of a website is extremely important now. A working multi-site solution is not everything. It has to work and to be easy and quick to translate. In terms of workflow, what does a user need to know about that field of translation services? There are many different ones. Supertext, you are most of all a translation service. WPML has integrated since quite a long time many different translation providers. Inside Polylang, there are options. There is the option of Supertext. There are approximately three add-ons which provide automatic or professional translation. Supertext is one of them. And maybe I forgot to tell something about multilingual press as well in that area. So what should the user know to orientate himself in that space and to take a decision? What will be my strategy of translating my content? And what should I know about quality, about different approaches to translations? I think first you need to know what you want to achieve. If you want to do a very high-end website with very well-translated text, for example for your homepage or for very important pages for the marketing part of your website, then certainly you want to use a human being to do this translation. And if you want to use human beings, you have different human beings doing different kinds of translation. So I think the kind of the goal and the budget you have is kind of the key to think about what kind of integration and workflow you want to implement. Also, if you work a lot on your website like you have a big website and you are creating many pages in two or three languages, it means then you have to focus on the workflow. Like you want to have a very good workflow because you do a lot of those translations. If you just translate one page per year, you don't care about HTML because it's just cleaning one time. But if you do a lot of translation, then the workflow becomes the center. So in VPML, you have this role of like manager of translation which is not admin of the website but allows to set somebody with a role to allow people to see the source language and the target language. So you have those kind of tools which helps, let's say, to have a workflow where you know who is doing what with which kind of authorization. Yeah, we have a new plugin from a translation agency we are partnering with is Transation Manager. And it's built up upon multilingual press. So you can export your posts and pages from your WordPress to the agency and get the translations back. And there is like super text delete, like all the stuff is already in there, the code, and they translate all the strings you need to do. So the approach is like, he said, it's really like, what's your goal you want to achieve? How many people needs to access that? How many people need to do that? So yeah, the goal is simply you need to choose which solution is for your current workflow the best. I guess the question is always, do you want to make the translations inside WordPress? Or do you want to work with someone externally that does this? I mean, there are professional translation tools out there that the professional translator has and they are much more powerful than anything you could ever put into WordPress, but obviously it makes your workflow a little bit more complicated. So there's always a bit of an offset, but I think especially with WPML, they put in quite some effort to level, to raise the productivity you have if you stay inside WordPress, and it obviously takes the time away where you have to export and import, which is always a bit of a complicated thing. Just a short point. For example, we use a lot of Google Docs translation because we work, for example, for hotels in the content of free work, and you need at least five or six people to review the text. Because you have political impacts, I want my hotel, it's very complex, right? So you have to write the text, you have to proofread, but then you have those people to agree about the text. So I think a feature would be this ability to have a kind of Google Docs within WordPress. This would be very nice. This would be paradise. That would be quite cool, yes. Just for the working together, there are some things coming up in Gutenberg, which is what people can work together on the document. Yeah, some kind of that is I think planned for Gutenberg to achieve that because it's the ground feature is there, so we have revisions in WordPress and you have the visual editor and you can do new things because of Gutenberg itself. So I think I was writing something about having collaboration on the document, but I'm not really 100% sure about that, but Gutenberg brings new stuff. Just one thing that I want to add. Maybe it's not very frequent in Switzerland, but I often see customers who translate their website automatically in several languages, and they just don't think that the translation of the website is not the end. Then once the website is translated, you have to interact with your customers. So if you only use automatic translation and you are not able to write yourself in the language you have on your website, you won't be able to interact with your clients, I would say in an efficient way. And believe me, sometimes I have to discuss with customers who don't speak either French or English, which are the two languages I can speak, and so we communicate with through Google Translate, for example, it's just a nightmare. It's impossible to understand ourselves, and very often I finally refund the customer because we can't help them. So when you create a multinational website, the end is not the translation of the website. Thank you for those insights. I would like to move now to an area of questioning that is interesting for me as a user that has tried different solutions and is always worried about the future long-term stability of the websites I built. I will mention something that happened four years ago at the WorldCom Pure 2014 in Sofia, which was an initiative of bringing a first step of multilingual awareness into a WordPress core. It was the post-language proposal for core, which was co-outored during a contributor day by a group of people, including Kasper, one of your former colleagues, and including Sylvan Hagen, who is possibly here. Not in this room yet, but he might be here later. And this was a proposal of bringing into WordPress the notion of a language that opposed, that the content could have a language which would be stored in a standardized way and which would bring the possibility of compatibility between multilingual solutions. You could disable a plugin and another one, and your content would still continue to work. It seems that this effort hasn't been pushed forward during the last years, so it's in a limbo. Are there other initiatives that are trying to standardize multilingual content in WordPress? And do you see areas where this could be moving forward and where the community could be a help? I mean, I'm not deep enough in the WordPress world, but from our perspective, we would very much enjoy if there would be initiative to put this forward. Some work has already been started. I believe it's in WordPress 4.7. There is a switching local mechanism has been introduced. Unfortunately, I would say that it has not been, it has been adopted by WordPress itself, so now if you are, if you are, you can select each user in WordPress and select its own language for the admin interface, and each user will receive his emails in his language. So this is the first step. The issue I see today is that I haven't seen any plugin or thing which adopts this system. I have seen only one, and this is WooCommerce. All other plugins did not integrate this mechanism. So if a plugin is sending emails, for example, except WooCommerce, none of them take care of the language of the email, even if WordPress has now the mechanism ready. It's not only a matter of core adding new features for multilingual or for internationalization also, which is very important, but it's also a matter of third-party developers of plugins and some adopting these new tools. So I believe that there is a lot of inertia. I think it would be good to have something like that in the core of WordPress. And VBML also thinks that. They told me that. But of course, if you have such a possibility in the core, it will not reach the level of the plugin we represent, because we are specialized in that. So we add a lot of functionalities that will never be in core. It's like with Gutenberg. Gutenberg will be able to do many things, but if you compare with, let's say, DV from Elegant Tames, it will always do much more because it is specialized in that. You said between, I mean, if you change the core, how will it integrate and not break processes we already have with our plugins? This is kind of the issue. Because you don't want to break websites, right? So it's always the issue how you change what is the path to change the core. Yeah, in Seville, there was also the multilingual core proposal on the community today. And there were several people involved, also the people from WBML, to work towards getting a multilingual in core. But the problem was that it's very time-consuming to deal with all the questions and workflows that arise, because it's not only like having the flag on the tag, flag on a post or page, something like that. It's even more like having the people working with that and having the base function for all plugins to join that. To have a layer of that and to have the API ready for all things. But as Matt said, and I think Montreal several months ago, it's still on the roadmap, but it's not the next time because Gutenberg is currently the most important one, but it's still on the roadmap and it will come to core in the future, but it's not really a current topic because as Matt said to the multilingual core proposal, it's currently plugin space, so the only thing that this proposal would do is help the plugins to work with each other. Thank you. I would like to open out with the discussion to the audience and accept questions about the things we discussed or about other aspects of the multilingual. Awesome. Everyone is satisfied. Okay, so I have a question about WooCommerce. So I know for Polylang there is a pro version with WooCommerce, and I'm interested to hear about multilingual press because I like the multi-site features. So how does it work if I have an e-commerce and I want it in one language and now I want to add a second language? How should I do that easily? Should I choose multilingual press or WPML or Polylang Pro for that? Yeah. We get a question for multi-site and WooCommerce very often. That's why we released our plugin on WooCommerce.com and the next feature we put in this version is the out-of-the-box WooCommerce support. So having the databases and the tables out of the box ready for this plugin and because we do the new version, the next plugin we will do is desynchronizing the stock. So if you have a stock-based system that you have the same stock on all sides because we know that by using multi-site and having the core doing the main work and not, as the other plugins need to do, twist WordPress a little bit to make it work, by letting the core do the whole work, we are compliant to all plugins. So that's why it's for people who are using WooCommerce in a professional enterprise or in a professional scale environment, we know that our solution is the solution they choose. We get it from other agencies because then you have the most ways to work with WordPress itself and to use the plugins you want to. So that's on our roadmap and we fully support that by having that multi-site and WooCommerce ready. Very, very short. So VPML has a very deep integration within WooCommerce. So you can basically translate everything in WooCommerce the different types of elements using VPML. When we start working on WooCommerce multilingual, you just must know that there is WooCommerce that is already a big part for the compatibility but you must think also to the extension and sometimes it's even more difficult for the extension. So it's not because there are integration with WooCommerce that there are integration with the extension or the extension of WooCommerce. It's much more complex to translate to have a WooCommerce multilingual or any e-commerce multilingual than just a website with page and... Yes. If there are no other questions for the moment, another one for me. There is. Good. I just have a question regarding the implementation of multilingual in WordPress. What's your thoughts about that regarding your business because obviously some of you is gaining money and it's your work. So what is your perspective on that? Do you need to reinvent yourself? A multilingual plugin is, I would say, 10% approximately of storing the language, the translation group and so on. 90% of the multilingual plugin is much more complex to help you to save time. For example, export content from a translation to the other and so on. So I would say that most probably the core would focus on how the translation are stored, the language is stored so it doesn't remove the interest of the existing plugin. So if sometime the core includes, for example, the language in the post, we will have all to adapt to this new way of storing the language, but that will not remove the interest of the plugin. I believe. Well, I cannot speak for VPML since I'm not working for them directly, but I think for the future the main change in the 5 or 10 years will be this big pressure but also opportunity from automatic translation. For example, Google is working very hard on that. They have Google Translate, but actually they are now working on a back version which is not public. They're using artificial intelligence to better understand the context of language. Some years they will come out with this new version and I think they will be in advance to all others when they do this. So I think this automatic translation and how to integrate this with high quality translators, this is the key for me because human beings will still be superior for a long time for translation, I think, but still technology can help a lot to gain time, to be very consistent with the words, how you translate, to find connections, cementing connections, to suggest words, all those kind of work floor, the technology can help a lot. So I think this is kind of what the plugins have to think about in the future, how to adapt to that, how to integrate this. Yeah, for us we are basing on core so if something comes into core we are happy to adapt. Does it answer the question? Yeah, here, sorry. I've got a quick question about speed because we all know that it's very important and do we have benchmark or something to compare all the plugins and to know which one is more reactive. I know that WVPML is a lot of consuming of speed for the website, for sure, but I don't know the other one and if we can have comparison somewhere or if somebody already did something like that, a benchmark or something, if we can find something anywhere. I would just jump in for the other plugins. I think experiencing the performance of the website or having a benchmark, many things of these plugins happen in the back end. So it could be slow for a ditto, for example, but it's not like most people seeing the page from the front end. So I can answer that for our plugin. We are using the core feature of WordPress, so we don't need to do things while the site is loading so we need to have a very small imprint in that so we are simply not standing in the way of the core so that's why we are by default fast. Yeah, it depends. Well, yes, it's true that WVPML has the reputation of being slower, let's say. It's a big plugin, it has many capabilities, but if you use a caching plugin, then you will change this because if your pages are already prepared in HTML, then you don't lose that much time. That's exactly if you use a cached plugin, all plugins are equal. Because the work is made only once. My question was also for the admin because a lot of clients are using websites that say it's pretty slow and you're not cached by the WordPress if you have some tricks or something. What do you mean, admin? When you are trying to translate to go to another page to move around? Well, I have a good connection where we work so we don't have those problems. I guess if you have a slow internet connection, it may play a part, but if you have a good internet connection... In fact, we can see that especially on the WooCommerce site. If you have a slow feature in WordPress, the multilingual website will only be slower because for example, if you are working with WooCommerce, you need to synchronize the price, the stock and so on. WooCommerce is already quite slow on the website because it's so a lot of meta. When you have to synchronize that in two, three, four languages, you just have two, three, four times slower and we cannot change that really. But WooCommerce will improve a lot with the new... I don't know if you are aware of that, but there are currently a feature plugin to have all meta stored in only an extra table. So it will be much faster and thus it will be much faster also with multilingual plugins. Considering WooCommerce is this data storage, things where you simply can rid of the saving stuff what WooCommerce does. We use it for our strong structural synchronization that we jump in when WooCommerce gets this data. So that's why we are very fast to use our own stuff we want to do, but for WooCommerce and all the other plugins, they are getting the same stock. So I get it from the admin perspective. It depends on where you are and how much plugins you have activated. But by doing like for us using most of the core functions, also in the backend, we are not really around there. So we are not causing any like lags because we are less visible in the backend. Thank you. Another question. I would like to use the opportunity to have you here to get a bit more insight about the development process of your different tools. As far as you can share them, like some of your products are having a free open version which is on workplace.org and a professional version which adds features. How does the development process work for the free version? Are you accepting bug fixes, contributions? Does this happen? Do you invite contributions to that code base? And how does the process work? To answer this, for our plugins, we had a free version. With the version 3, we have it only for Pro and we have a free version I think next year in that time period. And we are being on GitHub so everybody can contribute to the free version which is currently the old version of that. But we are working there but as we know that many people are using our plugins we are not getting that much code contributions from outside because it depends on whose agency is working with it but we are using the GitHub feedback and getting support questions and doing then add-ons for that. For VPML there is only a pay version. Actually there is two pay versions and you have also live accounts. You have a kind of blog version with limited features and a full CMS version. And now I think there is more than 600,000 pay customers to VPML. And for contribution I'm not aware exactly of how the process goes in VPML but what I know is because it's a very ancient plugin you have a lot of solutions so if you go on internet you can find people having written a lot of PHP code that you can use to change and modify and adapt VPML which is very useful. For Polylong the free version is developed on GitHub so we don't have a lot of contribution but we have some that we integrate. And Polylong Pro which fully integrates Polylong and the Polylong for VPML are developed on private repository but I would say that we are customer driven. That is the new feature coming from customer ideas. So we don't make our money with our blogging we make the money with the translations that clients order from us. We had like one or two contributions they were both from required so far. Normally it's really when we have bigger client projects where they use special plugins or they need special workflows where we change or enhance our plugin. It's on GitHub you are welcome to contribute but so far I guess there was not going on there. Do you have a last request to the audience? A question or an invitation? For my point please check multisite and multilingual because we had all the time people are not having that on the list and we had a WordCamp last week and someone came up to me after I told on the session that we use multisite and multilingual and they were simply mind blown by the possibility to use the multisite features itself to use that. So it's not about doing it all with multilingual if you have more than one site and you work with that and you have plugins please check multisite it's really a cool feature but less people know that so I want to change that. Okay I think we can give a round of applause to those four superheroes.