Lipyantar Slugs

Description

When a post title is written in Gujarati or Devanagari, WordPress builds its URL from percent-encoded bytes. “ગુજરાતી સમાચાર” becomes %e0%aa%97%e0%ab%81%e0%aa%9c..., which is long, hard to read and awkward to share.

Lipyantar Slugs transliterates these letters into Latin while the slug is created (“lipyantar” means transliteration in Gujarati and Hindi):

• ગુજરાતી સમાચાર → gujarati-samachar
• નવરાત્રી ૨૦૨૬ → navratri-2026
• हिंदी समाचार → hindi-samachar
• प्रधानमंत्री → pradhanmantri
• गणपती बाप्पा मोरया → ganpati-bappa-morya

It works for:

• Post, page and custom post type slugs
• Category, tag and custom taxonomy term slugs
• Names of uploaded media files

Supported scripts in this version: Gujarati and Devanagari (Hindi, Marathi and other languages written in Devanagari).

The plugin has no settings. Activate it and new slugs are created in Latin.

How it works

The letters are converted by rules, not by a word list, so any word is handled. The hidden “a” of a consonant is dropped where it is not pronounced (navratri, garba), and Gujarati and Devanagari digits become 0–9. A short built-in list fixes a few common words that the rules would spell differently, such as gujarati and vadodara.

Nothing is sent to any external service and nothing is stored in the database.

Existing URLs are not changed

Only new slugs are affected. Slugs that already exist keep working, and a slug you type yourself in Latin letters is left as it is. To give an existing post a Latin slug, clear its URL slug and save the post again.

For developers

Add or change whole-word spellings with the lipyantar_slugs_exceptions filter:

add_filter( 'lipyantar_slugs_exceptions', function ( $words ) {
    $words['સુરત'] = 'surat';
    return $words;
} );