Translating quizzes and questions with WPML

@rubidze

Unfortunately we do not have support (nor are we supported by) WPML.

We’ve started and stopped a project to support WPML many times but, LifterLMS was not designed in a way that’s immediately compatible with WPML and we have a LOT of work to do (what I mean is major rewriting of core LifterLMS functionality) in order to even make it possible to start working on WPML compliance.

I realize that internationalization is very important to any WordPRess plugin and it is important to us but WPML solves a different problem (multi-language sites) and while that’s arguably just as important it’s currently not something that we’re aiming to prioritize on our immediate roadmap.

We have a LOT of tough decisions to make with regards to any feature or plugin compatibility issue. We don’t have a huge team so we necessarily have to say no to a lot more things than we’d like to.

I’m sorry to have to take this stance but currently, without quite a lot of customization on your part, it’s just not going to work.

Thank you @thomasplevy for looking into this! I have got your point.

As a side note, I have tested many free and some paid LMS plugins. Unfortunately did not find so far any that works flawlessly with WPML. I have not tried yet another translation plugins, but I think that WMPL is quite popular and who ever makes his LMS fully compatible with them will gain a great competitive advantage.

I understand that moving forward with translation of Lifter LMS courses, lessons and quizzes is at my own risk and not much of support could be given from plugin authors.

But, I’m not giving up yet. I have managed to translate courses and lessons and even overcome of an issue with syllabus editing. If I could get access to quizzes and questions as well, I could test it and perhaps post steps I had to take to get it so far. Other users who voluntarily wish to do the same could get some hints.

To overcome my last obstacle, I would need to access quiz and question CPTs the way we access courses and lessons from admin menu. Would you please give me some hints how to achieve this? Some addition to child theme? Some plugins to use?

@rubidze,

Quizzes and questions are custom post types but they are *not* editable via the WP core editor like other post types. There’s a number of reasons for this and it’s quite trivial to expose the editor for these custom post types with a small bit of code. However, there’s a big thing to note here in that much of the content of quizzes and quiz questions is NOT stored in the main post content on the wp_posts table but in custom postmeta fields. These fields are editable via our course builder but since we chose to exclude them from the WP core editor we did not build interfaces to manage these fields from the WP core editor.

That means if you do expose them so you can work with WPML you’re very likely going to have a lot of follow up questions about how to edit other areas of the translated questions which we cannot answer for you. We didn’t build interfaces because the LifterLMS core plugin does not need them. So if you choose to modify that you’re on your own when it comes to adding additional support for things.

Here’s where to start:

https://developer.lifterlms.com/reference/hooks/lifterlms_register_post_type_unprefixed_name/

The dynamic portion should be replaced with “quiz” and “question” in order to modify the post type registration arguments.

The arguments passed through this filter are the arguments ultimately passed to the WP core’s register_post_type() function.

The show_in_menu argument is set to false for both quizzes and questions. You’ll want to set these to true.

Hopefully that gets you started and good luck!

Thank you @thomasplevy for providing a direction in this regard. I completely understand the risks and the fact that I am by my own on this path.

If I manage to achieve a reasonable outcome, I will post some guidelines that I had to take. Perhaps there are other volunteers who would like to experiment translating LifterLMS with WPML.

I did not want to open a separate thread for this, so I’m adding a small update on this translation project to this thread. I have been working hard with WPML support to get some kind of translation functionality. Many issues on the way, but we are slowly getting some stuff translated and it is definitely better than no translation at all.

Besides my project, WPML is very interested in cooperation with LifterLMS team to achieve better compatibility. They are ready to do some programming on their side as well if this will lead to better compatibility. But they would need some information and asked me if I could let LifterLMS team know that they are waiting you to join GoGlobal Program at https://wpml.org/documentation/theme-compatibility/go-global-program/

If it doesn’t mean that you have to rewrite your whole plugin and just some cooperation is needed, then perhaps LifterLMS team would be interested in this opportunity. Perhaps LifterLMS doesn’t have to change anything and WPML will make their plugin more compatible with yours.

@thomasplevy, if you see this could be something interesting to you, then you could discuss it with other team members and never know, maybe some time in the future we will have a perfect and first LMS plugin that is fully translatable.