Media translation question

John,

Thanks for this detailed and thoughtful post about your application, which should be of interest to other MLA & WPML users.

Regarding your first question, MLA looks for an active WPML plugin and only activates the additional MLA features when WPML is active. WPML must be active to manage the metadata translation with your option 1. Does that answer your question?

Regarding your second question, your proposal to use Att. Tags to tie the language-specific items together and use [mla_gallery] to display them is good, and using a tag instead of a category is the right choice. An alternative would be to define a custom field for this purpose. This would allow you to put “oral-versus-intravenous-bioavailability-v2” (without the language part) in the custom field and then use the same shortcode in all translations, e.g.,

[mla_gallery meta_key="File Root" meta_value="oral-versus-intravenous-bioavailability-v2"]

You can also display the custom field as a Media/Assistant submenu table column and (in the All languages mode) click on the value in that column to see all the items related to the same logical image.

You could implement a mapping rule (with a bit of extra PHP code in your theme files or a small custom plugin) to automate the custom field population when new items are uploaded.

You can’t do either of the above with a tag because WordPress/WPML requires a distinct “slug” for each tag translation.

I don’t think the database impact of either choice would be much different.

I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have any other problems or questions regarding the MLA & WPML combination. Good luck with your application, and thanks for your interest in the plugin.

Hi David

Thank you for your response.
I have implemented your suggestion of using the custom fields and it will definitely be a better option than using the Att-Tags in this case.

I have no problem with images that do not require translation, the WPML Media plugin/MLA system worked fine for these.

However you may have misinterpreted my second requirement a wee bit [or may be you did’ent ?? ].

In the case of this image:
https://eupati.staging.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/oral-v-intravenous-bioavailability-v2_EN.png

I need to present a different image per language because of the text in the image.

My current plan is to upload a different image to the media library per language. I have 7 languages, so I will upload 7 images.

I will use two custom fields to label each image as follows:

1. meta_key=”eupasset_name” meta_value=”DNA-structure-v1″
This custom field will hold the name of the image and will connect all images across translations.

2. meta_key=”eupasset_lang” meta_value=”English”
This custom field will store the language of the image.

So in an English post I can insert an English version of the image with the following shortcode:

[mla_gallery meta_key=”eupasset_name” meta_value=”DNA-structure-v1″ meta_key=”eupasset_lang” meta_value=”English”]

And in the German post I can insert a German version of the image using the following shortcode:
[mla_gallery meta_key=”eupasset_name” meta_value=”DNA-structure-v1″ meta_key=”eupasset_lang” meta_value=”German”]

This works as expected.

However, this method ignores WPML completely as the language is defined by my custom field:
meta_key=”eupasset_lang” meta_value=”German”

…not by any WPML function.

So my question is, can you think of anyway the above scenario might work by incorporating the WPML function. This would help automate the shortcode and keep it the same across of version of the translation.

I am not aware of any way (and I have searched) to display a different image per language in WordPress/WPML and I have seen a lot of people ask for it.

Remember the image file must be different per language.

There are other solutions out there using SVG and WordPress custom fields that I hope to use when IE8 is no longer supported from next January, see: https://css-tricks.com/svg-wordpress-custom-fields/.
but this solution will not be suitable for any non-vector images.

Would you have any thoughts about this?

John L

I am happy to hear my custom field suggestion was helpful. I believe your Option 2/second requirement can be satisfied by using one custom field as I outlined. I have tested it on my system and it is working well. Let me expand on my explanation.

You have an image with language-specific content, so you upload two (or more) images and create separate Media Library items for each image. Each item is assigned a language by WPML.

WPML automatically adds a language filter to the database queries used by [mla_gallery]. The language filter matches the language of the page/post in which the shortcode appears. The filter will select the appropriate item and only the item whose language matches that of the page/post. In your example, meta_key="eupasset_name" meta_value="DNA-structure-v1" will only return one of the seven items, the one with the appropriate language. You don’t need the second eupasset_lang field or shortcode parameter. You can use exactly the same shortcode in all seven posts/pages.

If that is not clear or if it is not working on your system, let me know and we can investigate further.

Hi David

Everything is working now as expected. Thank you so much for your help.

A donation has been made.

Wishing you all the best

John L

John,

Thank you for this good news and especially for your donation in support of the plugin and our Fair trade work. Donations, reviews and positive feedback like this is a great motivator to keep working on the plugin and supporting its users.

Good luck with your application; let me know if there’s anything else MLA can do to help. Thanks for your interest and support.

You may be interested in this new support topic along the same lines as outlined above:

WPML question

I would welcome anything you care to post in that topic to help extend the solution we have started in this topic.