Hi @rhisflow,
The plugin is returning the author of the “original” post. I guess it would make more sense if WPP displayed the actual author of each post instead, as you mentioned.
I’ll have that fixed on the next release. Thanks for reporting!
Hi Hector,
wow, that is a response I did not expect, what a nice surprise 🙂 !
You’ll have that fixed in the next release, that’s awesome!
Just out of curiosity (there is no rush whatsoever), what do you guess in terms of time frame?
Thanks!
best wishes,
Flow
Ideally, I’d like to release version 4.2.1 before WordPress 5.0 is out (November 27th, at the time of writing). That is if I find the time to work on it (hopefully, I will).
Hector,
you updated the plugin as promised, that’s awesome, thanks!
The actual author of each post is now correctly displayed.
However, I noticed another issue related to this:
The internal counter which keeps track of how many times a post has been read always seems to attribute everything to the original author, not the actual.
Example:
Original author John writes the post “English post”.
Then Jane translates that post to German, calling it “German post” (which has it’s own URL slug “…/de/…”)
Now when someone opens the english post, that one gets bumped up by 1 within the stat counter.
However, if the German version of that post gets requested, the english one gets another bump, and the German post never even makes it into the statistics.
But this would be crucial in order to display the most popular posts per language.
Do you think you could fix this?
Let me know if I didn’t explain it well.
Thanks so much 🙂 !
best,
Flow
Hey there,
This is a subject that has been long debated over the years, actually. Here’s my latest official standing answer.
In short: it’s not a bug. It’s the intended behavior so there’s nothing to be fixed.
Note that that GitHub issue is still open because while I believe that the current behavior is the right one I also agree that having separate views count per language would also be a nice thing to have. Thing is, this would require changing the BD table structure so the plugin can track views per language, and changing the DB table structure has been historically a painful process for users (and for me as well):
- Unfortunately, not everyone is using the latest and greatest version of the plugin which makes handling updates from older versions a PITA (eg. someone upgrades from an ancient version of the plugin to the latest one, skipping N previous upgrades checks in the process which might break things for them).
- Some hosting providers are very restrictive: in the few times I’ve had to change the DB table structure, I’ve seen some cases where the plugin has failed to do so simply because the hosting provider didn’t grant the user permissions to modify database tables. There were even a couple of cases where users could create tables but not change them nor delete them, which is crazy. My only suggestion to these users was “please, move your site to another hosting provider.”
- Some users will actually prefer the current behavior since that’s the way the plugin has been handling views count from the start. Changing that might cause some ruckus.
- There’s also the fact that not everyone that uses WPP also uses a multilingual plugin.
It’s not a fun choice to make, as you can probably tell.
Again, I might change my posture and have WPP track views count per language one day. For the time being, it is what it is.
Hi Hector,
thanks for your quick and comprehensive reply.
Of course I absolutely respect your decision to not change anything about the table structure.
Is there at least a workable solution to return the post title in an alternative language?
So I’m thinking while the DB table might keep on tracking the original post as you explained – after retrieving that as the most popular one, can a filter check if that post has a translation?
So there would be no need to change anything at the DB level, while still avoiding foreign language posts on other languages of the same site.
You know what I mean?
You know what I mean?
Yes, and that’s an entirely different matter than what we were discussing just before. I was a bit confused for a second there 😛
No, currently there’s no way to exclude untranslated posts from the listing. WordPress Popular Posts expects all popular posts to be translated, as mentioned in the Description page:
Show the translated version of your popular posts!
If a given post doesn’t have a translation WPP will display the original one instead, which brings us back to my position regarding the matter:
(…) some people out there are (mis)using multilingual plugins to be able to have two “separate” sites without having to set up a multisite network or a separate single WordPress setup for each language.
I could add an option/filter hook to exclude untranslated posts from the listing but that’s not a priority at the moment.
-
This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by
Hector Cabrera. Reason: Improved wording
Hi Hector,
I think I didn’t explain myself well.
No, currently there’s no way to exclude untranslated posts from the listing.
I wasn’t talking about excluding anything.
But maybe I’m misunderstanding the functionality of the plugin completely.
Let’s take my example from before:
Original author John writes the post “English post”.
Then Jane translates that post to German, calling it “German post” (which has it’s own URL slug “…/de/…”)
Let’s assume that the English version get’s read 9 times, and the German version 1 time.
In the stat counter of WPP, the plugin will attribute 10 times to the English version.
So far, this is fine with me and I’m in line with your reasoning that this is sound logic, as this post is in fact the most popular, regardless of its language version.
Now, here is where my misunderstanding might come in:
How can I display the translated versions of this post to readers who are on the German version of the site?
Let’s say I implement the plugin on the homepage to display the most popular posts.
So there is the “homepage.com” version in English and the “homepage.com/de” in German.
All I’d like to achieve is display the translated version of that popular post to the correct audience, and not show the English title of it to readers of the German site.
Does this make sense?
Does this make sense?
Yep, thanks for clarifying.
You shouldn’t need to do anything. The WPP widget automatically translates the posts to the currently active language. If that’s not happening in your case then I’ll need more details so I can help you debug the issue (are you using the WPP widget, or the [wpp] shortcode, or the wpp_get_mostpopular() template tag? What other plugins are installed on your site? Etc etc)
Note that I tested the plugin with Polylang to fix the author issue you reported and for me the plugin did translate all posts to the secondary language as expected, so you’re clearly doing something differently.
I just tested it and it works like you said it would!
I got confused because some foreign languages showed up among the translated ones, but that is because there’s no translation for those yet.
So everything works like a charm, thanks 🙂 !
