Research e-Labs

We examine support for the macronised vowels ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū required by the Māori alphabet in leading open source web applications MediaWiki, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Silverstripe and Plone and discover mixed results.

The objective of this project was to examine support for macron characters in a number of common web applications. A set of tests was designed to evaluate common usage situations across the applications.

Summary of Results

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
Banner/Heading
Browser title bar
Sub-headings
Search engine friendly URLs
Comments, replies and posts
Taxonomy and Tags
Rich Text Editors
Any editable content areas
Editable Footers
RSS feeds
Character-set
Search functionality

Detailed Explanation of Tests

Test 1: The “Banner” or “Heading” section – where the name of the website is contained.

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
Banner/Heading

This test establishes how the applications handle macrons in their respective display areas for the heading of their web sites. We used the applications’ respective editing tools to display “Macron Project ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū for Māori” in the header of the generated web page. The desired result is for the web page to render the header including the macrons as we had entered them.

Test 2: The application writing to the browser title box.

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
Browser title bar

This test involves checking the title bar at the top of the browser, to establish how the application interacts with the browser to display the page’s title if it includes macrons. The application should be set to display the title “Macron Project ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū for Māori” in the browser. The desired result is for the web browser to render the same title in its title bar.

Test 3: The sub-heading sections – where the ’slogan’ or ‘taglines’ are displayed.

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
Sub-headings

This test focuses on areas where the applications may allow slogans or taglines to be published on the web page. The phrase “ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū for Māori” was entered in the application. The resulting slogan/tagline should display the same phrase.

Test 4: Search engine friendly URLs.

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
Search engine friendly URLs

This tests whether the application supports search-engine friendly URLs. If supported, the test should also establish how macrons are handled in this context. The attribute in the application which controls what is written to the smart URL was set to contain all 5 macron characters to test. A desirable outcome would be for the application to successfully translate the macron characters into equivalent non-macron characters, e.g. ‘/māori’ translated into ‘/maori’.

Test 5: Visitor interaction – comments, replies and posts

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
Comments, replies and posts

This test is to check the macron character support in the visitor interaction functionalities of the various applications. This specifically points to any areas which allow the user to post opinions and comments. The line “Macron Project ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū for Māori” was entered as a test posting by a user. On submission, the message should be displayed with the macrons intact.

Test 6: Taxonomy and Tags

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
Taxonomy and Tags

This test looks at the tags that the applications allow the user to allocate to pages, and the categories that pages are allowed to be assigned to. These descriptive elements should be able to display macron characters. For categories, “vowels āēīōū” were created to put pages into. For tags, the macrons “āēīōū” and the word “māori” were used as test tags.

Test 7: Rich Text Editors.

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
Rich Text Editors

Each application uses some form of rich text editor to allow content to be published to the web pages. A quick test of the ability of these editors to handle macrons is to enter each one. “āēīōū” was entered into each editor for this test.

Test 8: Any editable content areas.

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
Any editable content areas

The main body of a web page, side bars and newsflash boxes are all content areas which need to be tested for any irregularities in handling macrons. A standard phrase “macronised vowels ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū required by the Māori” was used to test each content area’s display of the macron characters. The same test phrase was also used to check titles for these areas.

Test 9: Editable Footers

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
Editable Footers

The test looks at whether the footer generated at the bottom of the web pages in small print, if editable, is able to handle macron characters. “Macron Project ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū for Māori” was added as a test phrase to check the ability of the footer to handle macron characters.

Test 10: RSS feeds.

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
RSS feeds

The test is to check if the RSS feeds created when additions are made to the website render macron characters correctly. After performing the above tests, the RSS feeds were checked to ensure the macron characters are displayed properly.

Test 11: The character set the applications utilise.

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
Character-set

A check is needed to ensure the applications are using the UTF-8 character set and not the legacy ISO-8859-1 character set. This is due to compatibility issues with the handling of macron characters. The source code of the main published page was inspected to check the character set being utilised. The ‘charset’ property should read ‘UTF-8′.

Test 12: Search functionality.

	WordPress	Silverstripe	Drupal 5.4/6.0	Joomla 1.0	Joomla 1.5	MediaWiki	Plone 2.5/3.0
Search functionality

For the applications that provide search functionality, the following test scenario was created. Two pages were made: one with a lack of macron characters called “Maori no macron” and tagged with ‘maori’; one with macron characters called “the macronised vowels ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū” and tagged with ‘ māori’. Searches were made with both tags used as search terms. A desirable outcome is for both pages to turn up as search results each time. This is because it is desirable behaviour for the macronised characters to be processed as interchangable with non-macronised characters, whilst still being displayed completely.

Explanation of Test Failures

Joomla 1.5 content areas - unable to display macron characters.

Silverstripe search results - Maori and Māori do not pick each other out when entered as search terms.

Silverstripe URL - macron characters are replaced by dashes.

Joomla 1.5 URL - macron characters are replaced by “%20?,”

Joomla 1.5 page title - macron characters are replaced with ‘?’.

Joomla 1.0 Character set - does not use UTF-8.

Tags: macrons, Māori, Open Source

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 12:14 pm under Open Source, Product Evaluations, Standards & Compliance. You can leave a response, or trackback from your site.