Yoast and WP Multilang

Hi,

Thanks for letting us know that you are using the latest versions of WordPress 5.5.1, Yoast SEO for WordPress 14.9, and WP Multilang 2.4.1.

Would it be possible for you to try a conflict check and confirm that this issue only occurs with a default WordPress theme such as TwentyTwenty, and only the Yoast SEO and WP Multilang plugin enabled? You can refer to this article for more information — https://yoast.com/help/how-to-check-for-plugin-conflicts/

Would it be possible for you to also provide more details and steps on how we can reproduce this from our end?

So, i fired up new virtual machine with clean install of latest WP and default theme.
Installed latest Yoast and WP-Multilang.
Have added post and filled up meta fields.
Here it is – reproduced on clean install.
When Yoast enabled – meta fields shows only one language translation. Disabling it will cause to show meta title on both languages correctly.

Hi @zlines,

Thank you for doing this and letting us know what happened.

We believe this issue originates in the WP Multilang plugin, unfortunately. Looking at your opening thread, we see that you reached out to the plugin developer on both their .org forum and on their GitHub project but see no response yet. There is not much else to do at this point.

Looking at the plugin page, we are not sure if the plugin is under active development at this time as it’s not tested for WordPress 5.4 and up. If the developer doesn’t respond in a timely manner, we might recommend checking other multilingual solutions such as WPML or Polylang, that do get frequent updates.

I have checked post history and realised that in previos versions description field was saved as:
[:en]English text[:ru]Русский тескт[:]

Now field is saved without tags, and saved only one of the translations- latest.
Also if you will manually add tags, they will be stripped. So, i just think this is Yoast issue, some text validity checker os something like this. Yoast just cant insert [:en] or whatever flags it to db for some reason.

Can you check this please ?

I have just digged this deeper, and found this:
If i just inserting in database :
update wp_yoast_indexable set title=”[:en] English text [:ru] Русский текст [:]” where id=18;
All looks fine and works perfecly.
If i will add site name – all works perfectly.
update wp_yoast_indexable set title=”[:en] English text %%sitename%% [:ru] Русский текст %%sitename%% [:]” where id=18;

And if i will add separator – here is issue starts.
update wp_yoast_indexable set title=”[:en] English text %%sep%% %%sitename%% [:ru] Русский текст %%sep%% %%sitename%% [:]” where id=18;

Separator is “|”

Next step : I replace %%sep%% with just symbol “|” id db:
update wp_yoast_indexable set title=”[:en] English text| %%sitename%% [:ru] Русский текст | %%sitename%% [:]” where id=18;

Here is is – issue solved, all headers works as expected in both languages, but you cant do this from web interface.
Im not a coder, but this looks like some escape symbols issue or whatever.

Hi @zlines,

Thank you for your reply.

We are not really familiar with how the WP Multilang internals work, but we wouldn’t recommend using a multilingual plugin that stores multilingual content in one post object into the database. Post objects should be directly retrievable and work without needing to have a plugin parse the content for multiple languages. This can cause issues with other plugins or themes as well which expect direct content to work with.

We do know that Yoast SEO works well with WPML and MultilingualPress as alternatives to WP Multilang.

This just sounds like ‘we dont care, this is not our problem’.
Here is all disadvantages of “free support”.
As i know, other SEO packs have no such issues with WP-Multilang, and i will faster change your plugin to other one, instead of rewriting all my translations.
After all, i like Yoast and hope this can be fixed.

I have checked database sources. Looks like now i get closer:
metadata is saved in:
wp_postmeta.meta_key
There is field _yoast_wpseo_focuskw, it is saved correctly with language flags.
Next step – how is Yoast in interacting with db and why this field is taken from wp_yoast_indexable db fields.

Hi @zlines,

We’re sorry to hear that it seems that way, but we appreciate that you’d like to have Yoast SEO support WP Multilang.

Since version 14.0, Yoast SEO no longer relies on the post meta table to store data and has deprecated functions, there may be outdated code in other plugins.

Based on the information you provided, this should be filed as a bug report. If you’d like to communicate with our developers about this issue, we’re actively tracking bug reports and compatibility issues on our GitHub repository.

The best next step would be to create a new issue. You will need an account to create a new issue. If this is your first bug report, please check out:?https://kb.yoast.com/kb/how-to-write-a-good-bug-report/.

We also ask you to report this issue to the WP Multilang developers to confirm whether they have updated their code to support the latest version of Yoast SEO. You can also check to see if others have the same issue and whether they’re working on a fix.

So, i opened issue on github. Looks like nobody care, contributor just closed it like “our side is ok, its no matter how compability should work”.

Ok. I have purchased WPML , and guess what ? Yes, there is same issue.

Hi @zlines,

We understand that making plugins work together can be frustrating! We’re sorry that it’s not possible for us to help you with WP Multilang. Fortunately, we haven’t received reports of a similar problem with translated SEO data using WPML.

If you’d like us to take a look at the problem, can you give us an example URL for a page where this is happening and link to screenshots to show how you set the SEO data?

WPML has developed a compatibility plugin, so translating the SEO data requires installing WPML, WPML String Translation, and Yoast SEO Multilingual Here are their instructions for how to configure the plugin: Optimize multilingual sites using Yoast SEO and WPML.

If you have any trouble with these steps or with the Yoast SEO Multilingual plugin, we recommend starting with WPML. They will be able to tell you whether there’s an error in your site’s configuration or if there is a conflict with Yoast SEO.

Hi @zlines ,

We’re closing this thread as there seem no further questions from you. Please feel free to open a new thread should you have further concerns.