Dear TMS Team,

I need your opinion on what the best way is.

I am building a new website for our company. This website will end up being offered in at least 5 languages. We sell machine tools and therefore I need to include many tables with technical data.

These tables need column labels of course. Now my question is, which procedure would you recommend to work as efficiently as possible? The normal page content is created by the plugin WPML in the different languages. However, as I understand it, WPML cannot be used for wpDataTables. Would you suggest that I create one table per language and then change the shortcode? Or should I separate table header and table content? Create only the language-neutral content in WpDataTables and add the table header via CSS/HTML? Or do you have another suggestion for me?

Best regards

Utz

Thanks Aleksandar,

i will do it as proposed. :-)

Best regards

Utz

Hello Aleksandar,

I had a lengthy exchange with WPML on the subject. The simple exchange of the table ID is unfortunately not so simple in reality. 

Actually, WPML offers the possibility to include shortcodes in the translation editor via an XML file. This would make it very easy to exchange the ID. Unfortunately, this does not work in connection with wpDataTables. I was not able to determine the cause. WPML suggested whether you would like to make your product compatible with them.

Your product is excellent, as is WPML in its field, so it would be great if two very good products could work together. I also think it is very difficult to make the tables directly translatable. But at least the shortcode method should work without problems. 

Here is the link for developers to WPML: https://wpml.org/documentation/theme-compatibility/go-global-program/

Best regards

Utz

Info regarding the XML way (but it didn´t work for wpDataTable...): https://wpml.org/documentation/support/language-configuration-files/#1-1-translate-strings

Hi Aleksandar,

i did sme research together with Marcel from the WPML support team. It looks like that the numerical id is the problem. If you replace the id at the shortcode with a string like "AA" than WPML can show the shortcode at their editor. And then it is possible to exchange the value of ID to show another table at other languages.

Best regards

Utz

Hello Aleksandar,

i am happy to help.

The shortcode is only used to setup one table per language. If table Id in German language is the 10 , then the English language table will have for example the 50. But to do so, you have to see the Shortcode inside the WPML translation editor. 

But the wpDataTables shortcode is not visible at the WPML editor. They use an XML sheme to add unknown shortcodes, but because of the numerical data type of the wpDataTables shortcode this didn´t work.

I switched now to TablePress, their shortcode use string type for the ID. This works. The point is, at TablePress you can change the ID by yourself. You can set for example a code like DE-THV-series. With this you can see which language is used at the table.

If you check my demo page at: https://cuttingtest.com/fraesmaschinen/ you can see first a wpDataTables table and then a TablePress table. At the WPML editor only the TablePress table is visible. Please refer to the screenshot. If you change your data type for the ID to string ( and if possible make it editable by enduser) the problem should be solved.

Best regards

Utz