EffortLess Multisite Auto Translate

Journal

Only the most recent versions are listed here to stay within WordPress.org’s changelog length limit; see the plugin’s own repository for the full history.

3.3.6

• Change: the plugin can now be installed and activated on a single-site WordPress ahead of enabling Multisite. It stays inactive there, shows a notice and a « Requires Multisite » link on the Plugins screen, and does nothing else.
• Fix: if a site is converted to a Multisite network while this plugin is already active, the one-time network setup (permalink flush on every site, shared translation-memory table) now runs automatically the first time a Super Admin opens the Network Admin, instead of only on activation.
• Fix: Design Sync skips theme mods the destination already has with the same value, avoiding hundreds of redundant option writes on a re-run.
• Housekeeping: corrected an inaccurate note about which saves the form-element allowlist applies to.

3.3.5

• Fix: activating the plugin on a single-site (non-Multisite) WordPress no longer ends in an error screen. Activation now succeeds quietly, the plugin does nothing there, and a notice on the Plugins screen explains that Multisite is required.
• Security: translated and synced content is now always saved through WordPress’s normal sanitization (kses). The previous internal bypass that disabled kses while the plugin wrote translated posts, templates, patterns, navigation and global styles has been removed.
• Security: « Sync Design & Templates » no longer copies the source site’s Additional CSS to destination sites (each site keeps its own), and no longer copies the source site’s Additional CSS post reference.
• Fix: the shared-media URL rewriter that runs on the_content and featured-image HTML now escapes the URL values it inserts into the markup.
• Fix: logo, header/background image and menu-location settings are now written with WordPress’s own theme-mod functions instead of editing the theme_mods_* options directly.
• Change: « Requires at least » is now 5.4 (a major release, as WordPress.org requires, and still covering serialize_block() 5.3.1 and wp_date() 5.3.0).

3.3.4

• Fix: raised « Requires at least » from 5.0 to 5.3.1 to match what the plugin actually needs — serialize_block()/serialize_blocks() (used unconditionally throughout the block-translation pipeline) require 5.3.1, and wp_date() (used in the admin Status tab) requires 5.3.0.
• Housekeeping: shortened the 3.3.0 upgrade notice to fit WordPress.org’s 300-character limit.

3.3.3

• New: added the built-in WordPress AI Client (WordPress 7.0+) as a third Translation Provider option, alongside OpenAI and DeepL. Unlike those two, it stores no API key in this plugin at all — it uses whatever provider your site already has configured under Settings → Connectors. Hidden entirely on WordPress versions before 7.0. Per WordPress.org review guidance to prefer the core AI Client over a direct-only integration where practical; OpenAI and DeepL remain available since this plugin supports WordPress back to 5.3.1 and DeepL’s translation-only model has no AI Client equivalent.

3.3.2

• Fix: activation fatal-errored on a single-site (non-Multisite) WordPress install, since the activation hook unconditionally queried the network’s site list. It now shows a clear « requires Multisite » error and does not activate, instead of fataling.
• Security: removed the opt-in « Allow editor unfiltered HTML » setting, which granted the unfiltered_html capability to source-site Editors/Administrators to work around multisite’s kses stripping some block markup. WordPress.org review treats granting this capability to anyone below Super Admin as a hard violation regardless of scope or documentation — the existing wp_kses_allowed_html allowlist extension is the correct way to keep specific additional markup from being stripped.
• Change: the « Sync Design & Templates » tool’s description and confirmation dialog now explicitly state that it switches the destination site’s active theme (previously only « theme mods » were mentioned, not the theme switch itself).
• Housekeeping: shortened the readme’s short description to fit WordPress.org’s 150-character limit (was 162).

3.3.1

• Housekeeping: bumped Tested up to 7.1 (the current WordPress release) ahead of first submission to WordPress.org.

3.3.0

• Feature: DeepL is now a second supported translation provider alongside OpenAI — pick either in Settings, each with its own API key. DeepL’s own tag-handling mechanism protects shortcodes and internal placeholder tokens the same way OpenAI’s system prompt does.
• Feature: « Post Types to Translate » setting — untick any post type to stop translating it, both automatically and via Bulk Translate. Fixed a related bug in the same pass: the automatic save-triggered translation never actually consulted the translatable-post-types list at all (only bulk operations did), so this exclusion (and the existing elmat_translatable_post_types developer filter) would previously have been silently ignored for day-to-day translation.
• Feature: « Publish new translations as draft » setting, for reviewing a translation before it goes live. Only affects a translation’s first creation; updating an already-published translation is unaffected.
• Feature: a « Translation Status » box in the post editor’s sidebar (source site only) shows each destination’s status for the post being edited.
• Feature: a rough character-usage total (this month + lifetime) now appears above the API key fields.
• Feature: « Additional Instructions » free-text field, appended to every translation request — tone, formality, house style (OpenAI only).
• Change: replaced the « Translation Temperature » slider, which turned out to have never actually been sent to the API in any released version, with a « Translation Style » setting (Literal / Natural / Creative) that is genuinely wired into both providers.
• Change: removed the « Clean Up Duplicate Patterns & Navigation » tool — it existed only to clean up duplicates from a slug-matching bug fixed in 3.2.59, so it had nothing left to do.
• Change: removed the « Clean Up Duplicate Patterns & Navigation » tool — it existed only to clean up duplicates from a slug-matching bug fixed in 3.2.59, so it had nothing left to do.
• Change: removed the « Clean Up Translation Queue » button — stuck queue entries now clear themselves automatically within about an hour (was once a day) instead of needing a manual click.
• Change: enabling or switching the Shared Media Library setting now automatically fixes embedded media links on destination sites, instead of requiring a separate « Resync Media Links » click afterward. The button is still available under Tools for the unrelated case of images broken for some other reason.

3.2.67

• Fix: the lifetime failure counter that abandons a permanently-failing translation after 10 attempts was shared across all destination sites instead of tracked per destination. With more than one destination configured, a destination that failed on every attempt while the others succeeded could never reach the threshold (the others’ successes kept resetting the shared counter), retrying forever with no abandonment notice; conversely, a temporary outage affecting every destination together could abandon all of them at once, including ones that would have succeeded on the next try. The counter (and its one-shot abandonment-email flag) is now tracked separately per destination, and the Status Dashboard’s per-destination « abandoned » indicator reflects this too. Found and fixed via direct testing of the failure-handling code, not a user report.
• Fix: a Query Loop / Latest Posts block whose JSON attributes nest past 5 levels (routine once style, layout, and a taxonomy filter combine) could silently lose its category/tag filter during translation — the code protecting those attributes used a hand-built pattern capped at 5 nested levels instead of the recursive pattern used everywhere else in the plugin for exactly this reason. Verified against a 6-level-nested payload before and after the fix.
• Fix: uninstalling the plugin left behind per-destination-site options written by the logo/site-icon/header-image sync feature — these live in a different database table than the postmeta the uninstaller already cleaned up, so they were never removed.

3.2.66

• Fix: the settings page’s CSS/JS enqueue was registered on network_admin_enqueue_scripts, which is not a real WordPress hook (it never fires — the correct hook, admin_enqueue_scripts, is shared by both regular admin and Network Admin pages). This meant the plugin’s real wp_enqueue_style()/wp_enqueue_script() calls had never once executed; the settings page only worked at all because of a separate raw-HTML fallback duplicating the same CSS/JS directly into the page body. Found and fixed via real HTTP testing while preparing this release, not by a user report.
• Fix: that same fallback now uses wp_add_inline_style()/wp_add_inline_script() (attached to the now-correctly-firing enqueue) instead of echoing raw <style>/<script> tags — identical « always inline, no second request required » guarantee, delivered through a WordPress-recognized API instead of a hand-rolled one.
• Fix: the « Allow editor unfiltered HTML » checkbox on the Settings tab always rendered unchecked regardless of the actual saved setting — the computed value was never passed into the method that renders that part of the form.
• Change: internal prefix renamed from ms_gpt/MS_GPT to elmat/ELMAT throughout (classes, options, hooks, REST namespace, JS globals, CSS classes, file names) ahead of first publication — no existing installs are affected.
• Change: readme rewritten as documentation (external services disclosure, full settings list, notes and limitations) ahead of first submission to WordPress.org.

3.2.65

• Fix: a glossary entry could fail to match at all, and the term would get translated as if no entry existed for it — even when the entry looked correctly configured. A company name (e.g. « ID7 LLC ») is often typed with a non-breaking space between its parts so it never line-wraps in the middle, which is a different, invisible character from the plain space typed into the glossary’s own field, and previously had to match byte-for-byte. Any space in a glossary entry now also matches a non-breaking space, a tab, or more than one space, so the entry is found and applied regardless of exactly which kind of space the content actually uses.

3.2.64

• Feature: the Glossary now protects a brand name even when it is split mid-word by a style change — for example a two-tone logotype where the first half is one color and the second half another, authored as separate HTML elements next to each other. Previously the glossary could only recognise a protected term when it appeared as plain, unbroken text, so a mid-word style split made it invisible and each half was translated separately, breaking the mark. The exact original styling is now preserved untouched wherever this happens, while a plain (unstyled) occurrence of the same term elsewhere on the page still gets the translation configured in the glossary entry.

3.2.63

• Fix: the Glossary feature could fail to protect a multi-word entry (e.g. a brand name like « Honey Edge ») whenever a shorter, unrelated entry sharing a word with it (e.g. « Edge » on its own) also existed — whichever happened to be saved first would claim its match, and if that was the shorter one, it consumed the shared word out of the middle of the longer phrase before the longer entry got a turn to protect it as a whole. Longer, more specific entries are now always matched first, so a phrase like « Honey Edge » is protected as one unit before a shorter overlapping entry can ever touch part of it.

3.2.62

• Fix: the actual root cause behind navigation menus, patterns, logos and template parts still not linking up correctly on destination sites across several recent releases. Every place that reads a block’s reference (which post it points at) — a navigation menu, a synced pattern, a template part’s theme, a site logo — did so with a shortcut that only understood one level of nested settings inside that block’s own attributes. Any of those blocks with its own spacing, color or layout style set (extremely common — most blocks that have been styled at all have this) has more than one level of nesting, so the reference inside was silently never read at all, and never corrected. Every one of the fixes shipped since 3.2.51 was applying correctly, but a good number of blocks were never actually reached by any of them because of this. This has been replaced everywhere with a correct reader that understands any depth of nested settings, so every one of those earlier fixes now reaches the blocks it was always meant to.

3.2.61

• Fix: « Clean Up Duplicate Patterns & Navigation » could itself trash the navigation menu (or pattern) actually in use, if a template’s reference to it was not detected as such, showing WordPress’s own « This navigation menu has been deleted or is unavailable » message on the live site — a trashed post is exactly what WordPress treats that way, whether or not the database row still exists. The tool is now self-healing: it also looks inside Trash, and if the item it determines is actually referenced turns out to be the one sitting in Trash, it is restored automatically rather than left broken while an unrelated duplicate is kept. When nothing in a group is referenced anywhere, a published item is now preferred over a trashed one before falling back to « most recently modified » — closing the gap that let this happen. Re-running the tool is safe and will correct any site left in this state by a previous run.

3.2.60

• Feature: added a « Clean Up Duplicate Patterns & Navigation » tool (Tools page, next to Clean Destinations) that finds patterns, navigation menus, templates, and template parts on destination sites left duplicated by a sync run before 3.2.59, and moves the extra copies to trash. The copy actually referenced by a template or template part is always kept; every trashed copy can be restored from that site’s own Trash if needed.

3.2.59

• Fix: Design Sync could create an extra, duplicate pattern or navigation menu on a destination site instead of updating the one already there, so re-running the sync left destinations accumulating stray copies rather than staying an exact (translated) mirror of the source. The sync only recognised an already-copied item by matching its web address slug, but WordPress does not keep navigation menu slugs stable — it can rename one from « navigation » to « navigation-2 » behind the scenes — so a slug that matched on one sync could stop matching on the next, and a duplicate was created instead of the real one being found and updated. Every item is now matched first by its actual link back to the specific source item it was copied from, which does not change, falling back to matching by slug only the very first time an item is copied. This is also the most likely explanation for a header or footer needing to be manually reset to get its navigation working again after a sync: the reset was making it point at the correct copy, which the next sync could not find and update because of this bug.

3.2.58

• Fix: a backslash anywhere in copied or translated content — most visibly reported as Additional CSS (Appearance > Customize) arriving on destination sites with every newline and tab replaced by a stray « n » or « t » — was silently corrupted on every sync and every translation. WordPress’s own post-save functions expect content to be pre-escaped by the caller and always remove one level of backslash immediately before writing to the database; this plugin was not escaping first, so any real backslash in the content (an escaped CSS character, a quote inside translated text, and the case actually reported: certain editors store a literal backslash-n/backslash-t in Additional CSS rather than an actual line break) was stripped everywhere content gets written — templates, template parts, patterns, navigation, translated posts and pages, media captions, and Additional CSS alike. Every one of those save points now escapes content correctly first, matching how WordPress’s own equivalent built-in function already did it for Additional CSS specifically.

3.2.57

• Fix: the Header Image and Background Image set under Appearance > Customize were copied to destination sites as a raw link back to the source site’s own address instead of an image belonging to that destination — so removing or changing the source image, or the source site going offline, could silently break it everywhere else. Both now go through the same media sync already used for the site logo and favicon: shared through the shared media library when one is configured, or downloaded and stored locally on each destination otherwise.

3.2.56

• Fix: a navigation menu item linking to a category, tag, or custom taxonomy term kept pointing at the source site’s term on every destination site — only links to a post or page were being remapped. It now matches the equivalent term by slug on each destination, the same way categories/tags are already matched when a post is translated.
• Fix: a background image or other url(...) reference inside the source site’s Additional CSS was copied to destination sites unchanged, so it kept loading from the source site’s own address. It now goes through the same media-URL rewrite already used for images inside pages and templates.

3.2.55

• Fix: a reusable/synced pattern embedded in a header, footer, template, or another pattern could render blank or show the wrong content on destination sites. That kind of pattern is referenced by a raw post ID with no slug involved, and the ID was being copied unchanged across sites, pointing at an unrelated (or missing) post on the destination. Every pattern reference is now remapped to the correct destination post, the same way navigation menu references already were.

3.2.54

• Fix: a correctly-synced header or footer could revert to showing the wrong theme’s content shortly after a successful Design Sync, or whenever it was edited and saved again on the source site — the regular translation pipeline (a separate code path from Design Sync) never rewrote the « theme » attribute embedded in a template part’s reference, silently reintroducing the mismatch 3.2.53 fixed. That pipeline now carries the same fix.

3.2.53

• Fix: a synced template part (most visibly the footer) could look correct in the Site Editor but still show the theme’s own default content on the live site, because WordPress only uses a copied template part when its embedded « theme » reference matches the site’s active theme — copying carried the source site’s theme name over unchanged. Every such reference is now rewritten to the destination’s theme when content is copied.

3.2.52

• Fix: design sync could still update or match the wrong header/footer/template on a destination site that had ever run a different theme, since template/template-part lookups matched by slug alone with no theme filter. Every such lookup is now scoped to the site’s active theme first.

3.2.51

• Fix: design sync could copy the wrong header/footer (or other template part) content to destination sites, since template posts stay in the database tagged by the theme they belonged to at save time, and the sync previously fetched all of them regardless of theme. Templates and template parts are now scoped to the source site’s active theme before copying.

3.2.50

• Fix: the Translation Glossary never actually worked due to a reversed placeholder-substitution bug — every configured glossary entry was silently ignored. Matching is also now case-insensitive for Latin/ASCII terms.

3.2.49

• Fix: a translation-prompt gap that could let the name or value attribute of a form/block element be rewritten during translation, corrupting field mapping or stored data on destination sites.

3.2.48

• Feature: an opt-in setting (« Allow editor unfiltered HTML ») to fix « Attempt Block Recovery » errors on the source site caused by WordPress stripping block markup from non-super-admin saves. Off by default; enable only for trusted editors.