Polylang suggestions

Hello

I really like this plugin, I have switched to polylang from qtranslate. I have a few suggestions to improve it.

I like how widget translation works: you have the option to show the widget in All languages. If All languages is selected and you enter a Title, you can translate it in String translations. But you can also choose a specific language, and then the Title doesn’t appear in String translations.

I would like to have the same functionality in Posts, Media, Pages, etc.

Here are a few use cases where this might be useful:

1. Lets say I have 250 images and 4 languages. I want to add localized captions to 50 of them (the others don’t have captions). Currently I have to options: If I enable translations for media, I must set up all media in all languages, creating 1000 items in media library (I know the files aren’t actually duplicated). If I disable translations for media, I must upload those 50 which I want to translate multiple times. This way the media library will have only 400 items, but some files will be duplicated. The ability to select “All languages” option would solve this problem.
2. I have a few pages that have the same content in all languages, only the Title is different (for example galleries or pages with embedded content like maps or video). If pages translation would work like widget translation, I could solve this easily by selecting “All languages” option and translating Title in String translations.
3. If you install the plugin on a blog with existing posts, those posts will have no language set by default. I know that this can be fixed in language settings, I but don’t see the point of having a language-less state: these posts don’t show up no matter which language is selected. If I would like to have posts which don’t show up, I would set the status from Published to Draft. To solve this I would change the NULL language state from “language not set” to “show in all languages”.

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This is another suggestion:
I like the idea to have localized URLs, like /en/about-us, /de/uber-uns… The only problem with these is that some visitors try to change the language by modifying the language code in URL, and that doesn’t work. Theoretically I could add redirections to htaccess from /de/about-us to /de/uber-uns, etc. but this can be cumbersome if there are a lot of posts. I think this can be done automatically: if the requested post doesn’t exist in the selected language, search for it in all languages. If the post is found, look up the corresponding page in the selected language and redirect the visitor using header(‘Location: ‘).

The things I have mentioned are just annoyances, which can be solved one way or another, but they could be done better. Anyway, polylang is still the best multilingual plugin I have tried so far. Thank you.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/polylang/