Astartha Universal Slug Transliterator

A WordPress plugin that automatically converts non-Latin post and taxonomy slugs into clean, URL-safe ASCII — for every language, with no limits on post count.

Features

• Automatic transliteration for new content — every new post, page, custom post type entry, tag, category, or custom taxonomy term gets a clean slug on save
• Bulk conversion of existing slugs — one button in Tools → Slug Transliterator
• No post-count limits — bulk processing runs in small AJAX batches, so it works on sites with thousands or hundreds of thousands of posts without hitting PHP time limits
• All post types & taxonomies — every registered public post type and public taxonomy is covered, including custom ones
• Universal language support — covers virtually all Unicode scripts:
  • Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Kazakh …)
  • Arabic, Hebrew, Persian
  • Chinese, Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana), Korean (Hangul)
  • Greek, Armenian, Georgian
  • Thai, Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and dozens more
• Language-aware variants — applies locale-specific transliteration rules (Kyrgyz, Azerbaijani …) based on the WordPress site locale
• Zero configuration — install and activate; nothing else required

Other features

• Deterministic transliteration (not translation)
• No external services
• Unlimited
• Works for existing and new slugs
• Language-agnostic (script-based), results may differ from language-specific romanization

Known limitations

For scripts like Hebrew/Arabic/CJK, output is a mechanical romanization (no vowel reconstruction / no translation).

Installation

1. Clone or download this repository into wp-content/plugins/astartha-slug-transliterator/.
2. Activate the plugin in Plugins → Installed Plugins.
3. New slugs are transliterated automatically from this point on.
4. To process existing content go to Tools → Slug Transliterator and click Transliterate All Slugs.

Important: bulk transliteration permanently changes existing slugs. Back up your database first.

How it works

New content

The plugin hooks into WordPress's sanitize_title filter at priority 0. Before WordPress applies its own slug cleaning, any non-ASCII characters are converted to their ASCII equivalents using Unicode lookup tables.

Bulk processing (existing content)

The admin page triggers sequential AJAX requests, each processing a small batch of records (posts, then taxonomy terms). The browser keeps sending batches until all records are done, so there is no server-side timeout regardless of site size. A progress bar tracks the operation in real time.

Transliteration engine

The engine decodes UTF-8 byte sequences into Unicode codepoints, then looks each codepoint up in one of ~200 data files (data/xNN.php). Each file covers a 256-character Unicode block. Language-specific overrides are merged on top of the base mapping according to the site locale.

Character mapping data is derived from Sean M. Burke's Text::Unidecode CPAN module. The UTF-8 decoder is based on UtfNormal.php from MediaWiki.

File structure

astartha-slug-transliterator/
├── astartha-slug-transliterator.php   Main plugin file, hooks, constants
├── includes/
│   ├── class-transliterator.php       UTF-8 → ASCII conversion engine
│   └── class-admin.php                Admin page + AJAX endpoints
├── assets/
│   └── js/
│       └── admin.js                   Progress-bar UI, batch orchestration
├── data/
│   └── x??.php                        Unicode block mapping tables (~200 files)
├── readme.txt                         WordPress.org plugin readme
└── LICENSE.txt

Requirements

License

GPL-2.0-or-later — see LICENSE.txt.

Credits

• Text::Unidecode by Sean M. Burke — base transliteration tables
• UtfNormal.php from MediaWiki — UTF-8 decoding algorithm