Unicode Directory Names

[yaroslav]

Hello,

I installed the demo version, and using utf-8 for the encoding, directory names show up in the category editor in admin, and they show in the directory, however, the links themselves to the categories are blank, and do not work.

Look like http://directorydomain.com/ links rather than http://directorydomain.com/UNICODE-CATEGORY-NAME/ which should be showing.

This is essential for a multilingual directory.

Please advise if eSyndiCat can work with unicode or not.

I'm ready to purchase the directory for deployment on hundreds of Japanese, Chinese and Russian sites, but need unicode to work.

I'm looking at someone else's directory in Polish:

http://www.wyszukaj.com/aktualnosci-i-media/

Notice how the Polish letters in the category name got replaced with dashes. That's not acceptable to replace all non-Latin characters with dashes in a url. It should preserve the characters. So I wonder if eSyndiCat supports names of categories in other languages or not.

Also, conversion of Unicode in Domain Names to punycode that are being added to a directory is a must.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

Many people in Japan are using internationalized domain names, and also the new IE7 supports them already, so it would be appropriate to get this to work as well (links need to be displayed as Unicode, but the actual link should be in Punycode xn-- format, just like Google does it.)

Thank you.

[Simon Gooffin]

Hi yaroslav,
Welcome to our support forums and thanks for your interest to our software. Actually there is a functionality that allows to use our software for non-latin directories. It's a feature that's enabled in admin panel and called 'Enable path field for categories'. You can find it in Configuration -> General Configuration.

When you enable it there is additional field while your category suggestion. It is used for forming URLs. So let's say you have a russian category title but you can use english path for it so your URL will look fine.

[yaroslav]

Hi yaroslav,
Welcome to our support forums and thanks for your interest to our software. Actually there is a functionality that allows to use our software for non-latin directories. It's a feature that's enabled in admin panel and called 'Enable path field for categories'. You can find it in Configuration -> General Configuration.

When you enable it there is additional field while your category suggestion. It is used for forming URLs. So let's say you have a russian category title but you can use english path for it so your URL will look fine.

Thank you.

But, I want to use 100% Russian URL, Japanese URL, Chinese URL, etc. not English path. This is the best for SEO and easiest for users to understand.

It looks strange to have JAPANESE.jp/ENGLISH.

I need JAPANESE.jp/JAPANESE/JAPANESE/

Do you think you could enable this? I know this is technically easy to do.

[Simon Gooffin]

It seems you do not understand me. You can use anything you want in that field. In your path field you can use any word, letter, digit, etc. that's allowed in URLs

for say you have the following directory.
www.ru/dir/

There you have following categories:
Спорт, Автомобили

Your URLs can look like this if you use the functionality.
www.ru/dir/Sport/
www.ru/dir/Avtomobili/

I hope my example explain this some more clear.

[yaroslav]

Well, not really. I want URLs to look like:

www.ru/dir/Russian/
www.ru/dir/Russian/

[Simon Gooffin]

Ok, I see now what you mean. I'm sorry for the confusion. I thought you were talking about transliteration. I have just read the following information:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt

It seems this is possible to make for some languages. Now we have a long to do list and I'm not sure we will implement this in our future version soon.