This documentation outlines Breakdance’s approach to multilingual plugin integrations, our commitment to supporting developers in their integration efforts, and the vital role our users play in influencing the process.
Existing Integrations
Among the multilingual plugins commonly chosen by Breakdance users, TranslatePress is the most popular. Polylang has also been report as successful option by some users. The Breakdance team recommends Weglot.
Support Policy
At Breakdance, we are dedicated to providing excellent support for Breakdance itself, addressing any issues within our platform. However, we must clarify that the quality of the above-mentioned solutions or their integrations with Breakdance is not guaranteed or warranted by the Breakdance team, and we do not offer technical assistance or support for any issues caused by the use of third-party multilingual plugins.
Integration Policy and Developer Commitment
Breakdance is committed to collaborating with developers of third-party multilingual plugins seeking integration. While we do not undertake the development of integrations ourselves, we gladly extend our full support to multilingual plugin developers wishing to integrate with Breakdance.
We are happy to provide the following:
– APIs: WordPress already provides APIs that facilitate communication and data exchange between Breakdance and other plugins, enabling a smooth integration experience. We are happy to add to and customize those APIs to assist multilingual plugin developers.
– Action Hooks & Filters: Breakdance already provides action hooks and filters for a multitude of use cases. We are happy to add to and customize those actions and filters
– Integration Support: our team is happy to provide technical assistance as necessary to the teams of multilingual plugins wishing to integrate with Breakdance.
Our goal is to foster collaborative efforts with multilingual plugin developers, ensuring the creation of high-quality integrations between their products and Breakdance.
User Influence and Advocacy
Breakdance users play a crucial role in influencing the integration process with their preferred multilingual plugins.
Users are encouraged to communicate directly with the developers of their favorite multilingual plugins, expressing their interest in Breakdance integration. User feedback can prioritize integration efforts and demonstrate demand.
Active participation in official forums, social media groups, or community platforms dedicated to the chosen multilingual plugin can amplify the advocacy for Breakdance integration. Engaging with like-minded users strengthens the collective voice for integration support.
Our Reasoning
While we are committed to supporting integration efforts, we would face significant challenges in actively developing integrations with multilingual plugins. We wanted to take a moment to explain these reasons for this:
Problematic Plugin Updates: Plugin developers often release updates that break existing functionality in integrations, and the onus is then on us to divert our resources to maintaining working integrations that are broken due to actions of a 3rd party development team that we have no control over. Every time they release an update, our team now needs to drop everything we are working on and test our integrations still work, and fix them if they don’t – even though we’re not the ones who made the change. Hundreds of updates are released per year across all multilingual plugins.
One could say the same applies to updates to WordPress core, but WordPress is committed to maintaining backwards compatibility, and WordPress has very long track record of doing a near-perfect job at that. The same can not be said for multilingual plugins. Also, 100% of our user base uses WordPress. Obviously, the same is not the case for multilingual plugins.
Unpredictable API Changes: Plugin developers often modify their APIs without prior notice, leading to broken integrations and additional support work on our end. While official APIs are documented, in our experience they are severely lacking and therefore we have to use unofficial APIs to create an integration. Plugin developers feel no responsibility to maintaining behavior of undocumented, unofficial APIs, so if something breaks, the onus is on us to fix it, even though we didn’t break it.
Core Focus Diversion: Maintaining numerous integrations would divert resources and attention from our primary goal of delivering a powerful website builder experience.
Historically, Multilingual Plugins Provide Integrations: it’s worth mentioning that some other multilingual plugins have taken the initiative to develop integrations themselves with various website builders. In these cases, the responsibility for maintaining the integration falls on the plugin developers, not the website builders. We expect the same approach to be applied to Breakdance.
Our commitment remains resolute in enhancing Breakdance while collaborating with developers interested in integration. While we prioritize supporting multilingual plugin developers, actively managing and maintaining numerous integrations would hinder our core objective of creating a robust website builder.
We are deeply grateful for your understanding and continued support. Your feedback is instrumental in our collective journey towards a remarkable website building experience.
Additional Details
Discussion about WPML integration our feature requests board.