Archive for January 24, 2009

Add-on Plugin for German AZIndex Users

Jan 24th

Posted by English Mike in AZIndex

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Yesterday, a German AZIndex user asked if it was possible to convert German index headings containing umlauts to their non-accented equivalents when sorting indexes with German names in it.  The mappings would be:

Ä => Ae    ä => ae    ß => ss
Ö => Oe    ö => oe
Ü => Ue    ü => ue

Thus Österreich becomes Oesterreich and Müller becomes Mueller.  I am told this is a common feature of German telephone directories, for example.

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A Cautionary Tale For All Plugins Users

Jan 24th

Posted by English Mike in Blog Stuff

Well, it’s been a bit of a rough week for AZIndex and some of its users.  I knew that adding better support for indexes in other languages would be tricky, but I didn’t realize that it would be quite so difficult and bug-ridden.  After five quick updates in succession, I believe the serious bugs have been squashed and things seemed to have settled down (or it could be just that everyone’s taken the weekend off!).

Unfortunately, one of the bugs I introduced caused the upgrading of the AZIndex database table to fail on some systems, causing the loss of all their index settings.  I will be making changes to the plugin to prevent such a catastrophic loss from happening in future, but there is one lesson we can all learn from this incident…

Don’t go blindly upgrading every plugin the moment you see that a new version is available, especially if it an essential part of your blog, and certainly if your blog is a critical part of your business (or hobby).  That holds doubly true for plugins that are still under development and tagged as BETA software (as AZIndex still is).

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