After almost two months of beta tests, Polylang 1.8 has just been released.
As described in an earlier post, the most visible changes are in the plugin settings pages which have been totally revamped.
You are now able to choose your own flags for the languages, directly from the admin screen when adding or editing a language. The default language is now identified in the languages list table and can be modified directly in the table.
Since the last update, six new WordPress languages packs (ary, bn_BD, en_ZA, es_AR, fr_BE, fr_CA) have been created. These languages found their place in the predefined list.
The settings are now arranged in modules. One late change not earlier described is a new option to allow Polylang data not to be deleted when the plugin is uninstalled. If you want to delete all Polylang data when using the red “Delete” link in the plugins list table, you now have to check this option in the Tools module of Polylang settings. This option is unchecked by default.
The hreflang html tag now contains the locale instead of the ISO-639-1 language code. This will allow users having several variants of the same ISO-639-1 language to have valid W3C locales in the hreflang tags. Polylang also works around an issue in WordPress for non W3C valid locales (ex: de_DE_formal).
I also worked on the compatibility with Jetpack Related Posts, Duplicate Post, and worked around a bug in Nextgen Gallery preventing both plugins to work together.
Other less visible improvements and bug fixes are described in the changelog. Developpers having a plugin or a theme interacting directly with the PLL_Model class instead of the Polylang API should read the post dedicated to internal changes.
Last but not least, twelve translations are now taking profit of the plugins languages packs (automatically updated by the built in functionnality of WordPress): Albanian, Danish, Duch, French, Greek, Galician, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak and Swedish. Thanks a lot to the translators and translations editors!
