About this plugin
Publish a post titled お知らせ in WordPress and the permalink becomes
/%e3%81%8a%e7%9f%a5%e3%82%89%e3%81%9b/. It works, but it is unreadable in a
browser bar, it breaks when pasted into chat, and it is useless in a report.
The usual fix is to type an English slug by hand for every single post, and the
usual result is that somebody forgets.
Robse Auto Alpha Slug fills the slug in for you when you save. Kana are romanized, so
おしらせ becomes oshirase and デイサービス becomes deisabisu. A slug you
typed yourself in plain ASCII is always left alone.
Kanji are handled honestly
This is where other plugins quietly go wrong. PHP has no reliable way to read
kanji: the ICU transliterator that most plugins call reads them as Chinese,
so 村松 comes out as cun-song and 出雲そば as chu-yunsoba. That is not a
slug anybody wants, and it is worse than no slug at all because it looks
deliberate.
So this plugin does not guess. When a title contains kanji it cannot resolve,
it uses a predictable pattern instead — post-123 by default — and leaves the
guessing to you:
- Fallback (default). A clean, predictable slug such as post-123.
- Drop the kanji. Build the slug from the kana and Latin text that remain.
- Transliterate. The ICU behaviour described above. Correct for Chinese
sites, wrong for Japanese ones, and labelled as such in the settings.
A dictionary for the words you actually use
Company names, place names and people’s names come up again and again on one
site. Teach them once:
出雲 = izumo 美食旅 = gourmet-trip 村松英俊 = muramatsu-hidetoshi
Now 出雲そば 美食旅 becomes izumo-soba-gourmet-trip instead of falling back.
Longer terms win over shorter ones, so 出雲市 can differ from 出雲.
No intl extension required
The kana table is built into the plugin, so romanization works the same on a
server without the intl extension. Sokuon and youon are handled: まっちゃ
becomes matcha, ぎゅうにゅう becomes gyuunyuu.
Everything else
- Choose which post types are handled, or let the plugin detect them.
- Cap the slug length, cut on a word boundary.
- Try a title on the settings screen and see the slug before you publish
anything.
- Decide whether percent-encoded slugs are replaced or left as they are.