Reply To: Easiest way to create new WPML site with ACF

• goldhat

• July 23, 2016 at 3:32 am

WPML has a great guide on translation of ACF including a video on how to quickly duplicate the field groups. Unless I’m really misunderstanding the problem this video at about 1:38 shows the English field group being duplicated to Spanish the same as any other post types. But I’m not sure what the benefit is to translation of field groups other than the labels in the WP admin? Are you really fully translating the entire WP admin? Otherwise for the front-end why not just use English fields, any content entered can still be translated.

https://wpml.org/documentation/theme-compatibility/setting-wpml-advanced-custom-fields/

The video alone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osUX987d0EQ

About the suggest automatic creation of the translated versions, would that be useful? If somebody puts up a bounty I might be into making it. Again just not sure how often field groups are actually being translated. It would be a neat challenge though, I think the sync feature would be great if you add a field to English it duplicates that field to the translated versions. That would be a timesaver for sure.

As far as the suggestion ACF “should” do this kind of thing automatically… I’d have to disagree. This is a translation feature, it’s up to WPML largely to provide the mechanism of translation. The way ACF provides it’s post type for translation is normal compatibility with WPML. If you want something that provides automation or simplifies the process I think it’s normal for that to be an additional plugin specific to bridging ACF/WPML. Certainly it would not be good for performance to have ACF presume you want translate field groups, and start syncing them, when probably 99% of site owners will never use that feature.