I took the bait and installed the i18n module. I don't know why people told me it is a difficult to install. everything went smoothly.. almost. I installed the module, patched the core using the two supplied files in the patch directory. and then updated the database using the sql file included. I am still reading the documentation. So far, I managed to: 1) added i18, i18nblocks and i18nmenu modules. 2) added arabic to the locale. 3) added the Languages block and now I can change to arabic and english posts using the links of the block. 4) define each post as arabic or english. 5) add several muti-lingual blocks. what I am still not able to do: 1) change the direction of whole page based on language, blocks to the left for english, and to the right for arabic. 2) change the name of the language in the languages block to read in arabic script. 3) RTL and LTR are still not working. I still need to change that in html or use things like tinymce for this. I thought that i18n module will filter the arabic text and show it in RTL and english in LTR.
Also, I didn't get the part about the frontpage using the path module, as mentioned in the howto.txt and whever I try to config a metablock I get this error: 'warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/smhar/public_html/blog/modules/i18n/i18nblocks.module on line 55.'
Thank you all for the help and for the great program http://www.mishkah.org