News
Future Global Leadership: Now Supports Cyrillic
March 4, 2010
There was an urgent request to add a Serbian-Cyrillic version of the content to the Future Global Leadership website. It was kind of redundant to add Serbian-Cyrillic content to the site, since Serbian-Latin was already in place and because the character mapping between the two alphabets is 1:1. However, because Serbian-Cyrillic is considered to be the true Serbian alphabet, a lot of the visitors wanted a truly Serbian version of the content made available on the site.
There were 2 options: One was to treat Serbian-Cyrillic as a completely new language and manually take all the existing text written in Serbian-Latin, run it through some sort of an offline Latin-to-Cyrillic converter, and copy the result back into to the site. This would obviously create a large overhead in terms of maintaining content, because now we would have three languages to maintain (English, Serbian Latin, Serbian Cyrillic), instead of just two (English and Serbian).
So we decided it would be best to go with the second option: Build a Latin-to-Cyrillic convertor into the website backend, and when Serbian-Cyrillic is selected, fetch the content in Serbian-Latin, run it through the convertor, and then render it to the user. This meant no extra overhead when adding or updating content. Of course it was more involved in terms of development and testing, but the end result was a long term solution which can be reused for future content and websites.
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