I've spent the last few years building and maintaining JathakaPorutham (https://www.jathakaporutham.com), a horoscope/jathakam matching platform used by Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam-speaking families to check marriage compatibility.
A few technical challenges worth sharing from this project:
The stack
- Backend: PHP with CodeIgniter 4
- Astrology calculation engine: Python (planetary positions, nakshatra, dosham calculations)
- PDF report generation: mPDF
- Hosted on AWS EC2 (Apache, PHP-FPM, MariaDB)
Multi-language, not just translation
Supporting three languages isn't just about translating UI strings. Each language has its own astrological terminology, script rendering (Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam Unicode), and even different sets of compatibility rules that users expect (Rajju, Vedha, Rasi, Gana, Nakshatra Porutham vary slightly by regional tradition).
Performance for a content-heavy site
Since search visibility matters a lot for a site like this, I've been working through:
- Combining and preloading CSS to cut render-blocking requests
- Enabling HTTP/2
- Replacing icon libraries with inline SVGs to reduce JS payload
Happy to answer questions if anyone's working on similar regional-language or astrology-adjacent tools. Also curious how others handle SEO stability when running multi-language versions of the same page — that's been the trickiest part lately.
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