Arabic Slug Schema Guard

Arabic Slug Schema Guard A WordPress must-use plugin that stops core updates from silently truncating long Arabic (and other non-Latin) URLs. 📖 Full write-up: The 200-byte trap: why WordPress core updates break Arabic URLs The problem WordPress stores post and term slugs percent-encoded in VARCHAR(200) columns (wpposts.postname, wpterms.slug). Each Arabic character costs about six bytes once URL-encoded, so a VARCHAR(200) column holds only ~33 Arabic characters, and Arabic publishers widen the columns to VARCHAR(1024). The trap: on every major core update, dbDelta() reconciles the live schema against WordPress's canonical schema and shrinks VARCHAR(1024) back to VARCHAR(200). Unlike TEXT/BLOB, VARCHAR has no downsize protection, so the truncation is silent and unrecoverable, and your long-headline URLs start returning 404. Widening the column alone isn't enough, either: WordPress hard-codes 200 in three independent places: storage, slug generation (sanitizetitlewithdashes()), and collision de-duplication (truncatepostslug()). What it does - Prevents the shrink (Layer 1): filters dbdeltacreatequeries so dbDelta's desired schema already says 1024; it never emits a destruc