WPP & WPML

Hi @sean-h!

(…) it is displaying the same posts both in English and Dutch

Yep, that’s the expected behavior actually.

From plugin’s Description page:

Polylang & WPML 3.2+ support – Show the translated version of your popular posts!

WPP won’t track views by language.

or is it just displaying the most popular post on the site regardless of language?

Close enough, but yeah that’s one way to put it as well.

Well, there’s currently no way to have WPP track views on a per language basis. At least not without making some substantial modifications to the plugin: we’d likely need to modify WPP’s database tables so the plugin knows which views data belong to which version of the article (language wise).

Plus, making such a change would probably upset users who do want the existing behavior and so it’s not something I can do thoughtlessly. In that case having a toggle-able option that enables one or the other behavior sounds like the obvious desirable choice, but then what do we do about the views data that’s already on the database? I’d need to implement some sort of migration process to sort that out.

And then we have users who may switch between the two behaviors (storing views data as a single entity for all versions of an article vs storing views individually) just for “the fun of it” or to “experiment” which is another kind of problem on its own, the plugin would need to be smart enough to save these users from themselves while keeping data consistent.

Can you see why I’d rather keep the existing behavior? 😛 That doesn’t mean that I’m not open to reconsider it, it’s just that right now it’s not something that I’d like to nor can work on (being a full-time developer working for a company another limitation to take into account as well).

To be honest you’re not the first person to ask about this but yeah not a lot of people have expressed interest in this so far either. Might be a good idea for a Pro version of the plugin, if it ever exists, so thanks for the suggestion.

And since you mentioned it, if you want to learn PHP my advice would be -hope you don’t mind- to start with Laravel. It’s a very well-known PHP framework that follows modern PHP practices. It can be a bit daunting at first, especially if you’re not familiar with PHP, but trust me when I say that you’ll love it once you get the hang of it @sean-h. At least that has been my own experience with it so far. Laravel helps you write clean, reusable code and that’s something that will prove valuable in the long run.

WordPress is great, too, but it’s a bit far behind when it comes to current development practices (they’re working on it though!)

Oh, and speaking of clean, reusable code: make sure to learn the SOLID principles first. Carl Alexander has a couple of nice articles about it that are worth checking out (this is not a paid promotion, I genuinely think the guy’s a great developer).

P.S.: Sorry, I got a bit carried away.