not suitable for WMPL / Multi-language

Hi @innertreecom

You are correct, it has always said: “Integrates with Polylang and WPML allowing you to assign reviews to all languages of a multilingual page“.

Site Reviews was built to allow you to easily assign reviews to any of your pages. Since multilingual plugins such as WPML and Polylang duplicate the pages for each language, assigning a review to your English page will not also assign it to your French page.

This works great for people who prefer to have their French reviews on their French pages, and their English reviews on their English pages. However, it does not work well for people who want to display all reviews on both the French and English pages, regardless of the language.

So, if you want to display all reviews on both the French and English pages, regardless of the language, then, “Integrates with Polylang and WPML allowing you to assign reviews to all languages of a multilingual page” means that if you enable the Multilingual integration in the Site Reviews settings, then all reviews assigned to any language of a page will display on all languages of that page.

I later added clarification that: “translating reviews is not supported” to clarify that the Multilingual integration works for review assignment and not for review translation.

I am unsure what you mean by the last part of your review.

the plugin works but you almost have to be a developer and play a lot with the fields/toggles to use to get a proper result. Once done, never touch it again.

Are you referring to the settings of the plugin and that there are too many plugin settings available?

Or, are you referring to the shortcodes and that there are too many shortcode options available? I can understand that it can be a little confusing to start with since there are so many shortcode options available, however, the shortcode options are well documented and you can find the documentation on the Help & Support page. Site Reviews also provides Gutenburg blocks and Elementor widgets which can be used instead of the shortcodes.

Or, are you referring to adding custom fields to the review form? For this there is the Review Forms addon which makes it very easy to do, no developer required.

I run a multi-language website. How can I manually translate the reviews?
So far, I did not find how to assign a review to a specific language.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by newbie009.

I tried to import the reviews ( <300 ) using a csv. with the addition of column “language” and parameters according to WPML (en, de, fr). One imported, it shows all reviews regardless of the chosen language.

So far no answer from Site Reviews.

WPML answered: “Site Reviews is not following guidelines of WPML and not compatible”

As WPML cannot retrieve the content for translation, the only solution would be to add another category with the language defined and either manually adding the category to each review or to manually export and import the related reviews.

In my case all reviews are translated into three languages.
There is no such function to duplicate a review for translation. Therefore, it must be exported and imported every time a new review is made, applying different language categories to each translations.

For only a few reviews this is ok, but if lots of reviews need to be translated, this is not a suitable solution.

Hope the developer picks up this issue and fixes the translation problematic.

So far no answer from Site Reviews.

I thought my reply here was clear. Site Reviews does not support directly translating reviews with WPML.

The multilingual integration allows you to use the review assignment feature with multilingual pages. This is useful in cases where you are assigning reviews to your pages and you want the reviews to be assigned to all languages of a page (instead of directly the specific language of a page), and you want the rating summary to work in the same way.

Site Reviews was originally built to work in the same way as Amazon, Tripadvisor, Google, etc. On those platforms, reviews are submitted once by the reviewer (i.e. they are not submitted or modified by the site owner). Those platforms provide on-the-fly translations for reviews, this also adds authenticity to reviews.

Future Multilingual plans for Site Reviews (i.e. multilingual reviews) include the following:

• On-the-fly translations of review from the front-end using OpenAI (the free API key that OpenAI provides will be more than enough for most users).
• Integration with MultilingualPress, which uses the built-in Multisite feature of WordPress to provide multilingual functionality that is much more performant than plugins like WPML (which duplicate multilingual content in the same database and add a layer of complexity to database queries making them slower).

Site Reviews is not following guidelines of WPML and not compatible

WPML guidelines are not the same as WordPress guidelines.

Site Reviews stores review information in custom database tables, and it uses custom MySQL queries which have been profiled and are much more performant than using the WordPress WP_Query methods. You may not notice a difference on a typical website, but when you have thousands (or tens of thousands) of assigned reviews with no noticeable difference in performance, this is due to those custom SQL queries.

@geminilabs

Sorry for the late response on my part.

About: “the plugin works but you almost have to be a developer and play a lot with the fields/toggles to use to get a proper result. Once done, never touch it again.”
While creating a shortcode I really had to play with variables and interpunction to get the result that I wanted. The documentation is in my opinion quite basic and not all options are explained. Rather, I had to distill bits of desired code from the various examples and compile them into one shortcode. Next, in my memory the shortcode builder doesn’t always return a working result. Maybe there’s interference with Avada?

About: “the review form”. I have not figured out how that works. It doesn’t seem out-of the-box? So no experience with that yet and I bypass that by GravityForms.

About “Multilingual Support” (the heart of my comment). In my view “Multilanguage” means “translation”. That is not the case. Rather, you point out that any review can be assigned the ONE language specific page – and that constitutes multi language. In my case, I have a coaching & training company that uses reviews on multiple pages and Woo-products. And yes, all those multiple pages are translated into English. So there is no possibility to assign to ONE page if I wanted. And I donot want that because Dutch reviews are translated into English and English reviews into Dutch. The workaround is to duplicate all Categories and have translated reviews assign to those duplicated categories (only feasible with import).

I hope this gives you a clear impression of required functionality?

While creating a shortcode I really had to play with variables and interpunction to get the result that I wanted. The documentation is in my opinion quite basic and not all options are explained.

Site Reviews provides Gutenberg blocks and Elementor widgets which are much easier to use. Since you are using Avada builder, you are stuck with using the shortcodes.

The Shortcodes documentation is quite extensive. ALL available shortcode options are documented there with examples for each one.

Shortcodes are a basic feature of WordPress but if you are not familiar with them, it can be a bit of a learning curve.

Rather, I had to distill bits of desired code from the various examples and compile them into one shortcode.

That’s how shortcode options work: you only use them when you need them. The Shortcodes documentation explains each option separately. This is the most logical and simple way to document them.

Next, in my memory the shortcode builder doesn’t always return a working result. Maybe there’s interference with Avada?

I don’t use Avada so I can’t speak for it.

About: “the review form”. I have not figured out how that works. It doesn’t seem out-of the-box? So no experience with that yet and I bypass that by GravityForms.

It does work out-of-the-box. Just add the [site_reviews_form] shortcode to your page. If you are having problems with the star rating field or with submitting reviews with the form, make sure that you are not causing the problem with a caching/optimization plugin. Sometimes when you try to “optimize” javascript and css files from plugins, you break the plugins.