Cyr-To-Lat is a transliteration plugin designed to convert post slugs from multiple Cyrillic and non-Latin languages to Latin. How is it different from the competitors?
Search for wp.org gives a number of plug-ins transliteration (sorted by the descending number of installations):
- Cyr-To-Lat ( 100,000+ )
- Cyr to Lat enhanced ( 100,000+, outdated )
- Rus-To-Lat ( 100,000+, outdated )
- WP Translitera ( 40,000+, outdated )
- Cyr to Lat reloaded – transliteration of links and file names ( 30,000+, outdated )
- Cyrlitera – transliteration of links and file names ( 10,000+ )
- SrbTransLatin — Serbian Latinisation ( 4,000+ )
- SP RTL (RusToLat) ( 3,000+, outdated )
- Ukr-To-Lat ( 3,000+, outdated )
- German Slugs ( 2,000+, outdated )
- Bulglish Permalinks ( 1,000+, outdated )
- wp-cyr-cho | Convert Cyrillic symbols to Latin ( 1,000+, outdated )
- Serbian Latinisation (Serbian Transliteration) ( 600+, outdated )
- Geo to Lat ( 500+, outdated )
- translit-it ( 300+, outdated+ )
- DZ TRANSLIT (SEO permalinks) ( 200+ )
- HyToLat ( 200+, outdated )
- Rus-to-Eng ( 100+, outdated )
- cyr-to-arabic ( 20+, outdated )
- Behnevis Transliteration ( <10, outdated )
- Custom Transliteration ( <10, outdated )
- RusEng ( <10, outdated )
- Transliterate Arabic ( <10, outdated )
- WP Nice Slug ( <10, outdated )
We see that most transliteration plugins are no longer supported, and there is no guarantee that they will work with the latest versions of WordPress. That’s the way it is – almost all outdated plugins don’t work with Gutenberg.
Actually, this analysis could be finished. The nearest supported competitor has 10 times fewer installations, which is an indicator of user confidence and reliability.
However, let’s go on and leave plugins with a significant number of installations (> 10,000) and supported, with any number of installations to analyse. The abbreviated list looks like this:
| Name | Number of installations | Table editing | Languages |
| Cyr-To-Lat | 100,000+ | There is a visual, in the form of tables, with the addition/removal of pairs of transliteration | Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Greek, Armenian, Georgian, Kazakh, Hebrew, and Chinese |
| Cyr to Lat enhanced | 100,000+, outdated | No | Russian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian |
| Rus-To-Lat | 100,000+, outdated, all functionality transferred to Cyr-To-Lat | No | Cyrillic, unbound to the site’s current locale |
| WP Translitera | 40,000+, outdated | Inconvenient like я=ja | Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Georgian |
| Cyr to Lat reloaded | 30,000+, outdated | Inconvenient like Ё=Jo,ё=jo,Ж=Zh,ж=zh | Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Greek, Armenian and Serbian |
| Cyrlitera | 10,000+ | Inconvenient like Ё=Jo,ё=jo,Ж=Zh,ж=zh | Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Greek, Armenian and Serbian |
| SrbTransLatin | 4,000+ | No | Serbian |
| DZ TRANSLIT | 200+ | No settings at all | Cyrillic, unbound to the site’s current locale |
Cyr-To-Lat wins again in terms of the number of languages supported. And there is nothing even close to it the convenience of tables editing:
Here you can see how you can add your pair of transliteration, consisting of even several characters: ‘пиво’ => ‘beer’. By clicking on the ‘+’ symbol, you can add another pair. By clicking on the Cyrillic letter – edit or remove it from the table.
Just two plugins on this list claim compatibility with WPML: Cyr-To-Lat and SrbTransLatin. And only Cyr-To-Lat has an official certificate and confirmation on the wpml.org website.
Only Cyr-To-Lat is compatible with the popular ACF plug-in to create custom fields.
Some of the plugins can make a massive conversion of post labels and taxonomies: Cyr-To-Lat, Cyr to Lat enhanced, WP Translitera, Cyr to Lat reloaded, cyrlitera. If you have a large number of labels to convert, this process is interrupted due to the limitations of processor time on the server. And only Cyr-To-Lat makes such a conversion through the background queues, which allows you to reliably convert any number of labels – even hundreds of thousands and millions.
Also, Cyr-To-Lat is the only plugin with can transliterate attachment and thumbnail filenames during mass conversion.
None of the plugins in the review, except Cyr-To-Lat, can work through wp-cli, which is another reliable method of mass label conversion.
Only Cyr-To-Lat meets WordPress Coding Standards, allowing development to be done at a modern level.
None of the plugins in the review, except Cyr-To-Lat, has tests. While Cyr-To-Lat php and js code is covered in 100% by tests, which allows you to maintain the reliability of the plugin at the highest level.
The Cyr-To-Lat code, along with tests and development environments, is available to third-party developers on GitHub. Requests to improve the code are welcome.
To sum up, the Cyr-To-Lat plug-in has no competitors at the moment, and the use of any other transliteration plugin is meaningless. Due to the fact that all these plugins are in one way or another the heirs of the plugin Rus-To-Lat, created by Anton Skorobogatov, the transition from other plugins to Cyr-To-Lat does not cause any problem.