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.
After recently working on an application to generate Microsoft Excel documents using a PHP script, I ran into trouble with the PEAR package “Spreadsheet Excel Writer” which didn’t correctly display UTF-8 characters (Māori macrons in this case). Here is a fix!
We have contributed to a submission from the State Services Commission to the New Zealand Domain Name Commission, developing discussion points regarding the implementation of IDNs into the .nz domain name space - which would enable the registration of domain names using the five additional characters of the Māori alphabet, the macronised vowels ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū.
