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.
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).