I’m evaluating Ghost for potential use with a web site in the Japanese market. I understand that parts of i18n are taken care of in themes (“publication language”, “portal translation” in Labs, etc.) and translation can also be supplied for some UI elements (customizing Site Navigation).
However, the major, existing limitations appear to be (1) undesirable automatic transliteration of non-Latin texts and (2) Ghost not allowing UTF-8 characters as part of URL. As seen in the following examples, these appear to be long-standing issues for which no satisfactory solutions have been implemented:
- (Several URLs here, but the editor complains that a new poster can only include 3 links in a post…I’ll try posting in the thread that follows.)
On auto transliteration, a 2018 post above seems to indicate the root cause is the use of a package (unidecode) not sufficiently sophisticated to deal with more complex languages like CJK. In the case of Japanese, the package is not capable of distinguishing different sets of characters, so Kanji in Japanese gets transliterated into the Chinese equivalent words, generating funny looking/sounding slugs. (Unfortunate thing is, the Usage example at GitHub - FGRibreau/node-unidecode: 📃 ASCII transliterations of Unicode text is already wrong, an apparent sign that the results are not native-checked, so this is the limitation of package that Ghost is simply inheriting.)
This makes Ghost hard to use as part of professional web sites. The only work around I can currently think of is to manually supply ASCII-only transliteration for all the posts and tags, which doestn’t look optimal.
It seems to me that auto transliteration needs to be improved as per language basis, e.g., using kuroshiro (GitHub - hexenq/kuroshiro: Japanese language library for converting Japanese sentence to Hiragana, Katakana or Romaji with furigana and okurigana modes supported.) for Japanese, for example.
As for UTF-8 in URL (paths & params), I’m not sure why Ghost doesn’t allow this and what the plan is.
My questions are:
- Is there any plan to ever fix these issues or is there already an ongoing effort?
- Is this an area of (open-source) development, likely in GitHub - TryGhost/SDK: Tools for working with Ghost's APIs, for which you are open to external contributions if someone contributes a patch?
Cheers,