I have a Drupal site http://www.mishkah.org/blog and I want to make the followings: 1) Be able to post english and arabic blogs/stories/pages. This I can do as Drupal supports UTF-8 2) Be able to make english posts appear from Left-To-Right while arabic posts appear from Right-To-Left. For this I found few options. a) using bidi.theme and bidi.module (which is a filter module) b) using i18n module, which needs patching the core. c) encoding the post in html tags. d) using input module to do that. So far, I found that Htmlarea, Tinymce, FCKeditor and Xinha all do this. I am currently using Tinymce. What I really want to do is this: when a visitor enters the site, I want him to be able to display only the english posts or arabic posts or both -or both, all the posts-. I also want him to be able to change the language of the navigation menu and other blocks if they have an alternative language. These are the options I thought of so far: 1) I can make two site http://www.ar.mishkah.org/blog and http://www.en.mishkah.org/blog or make http://www.mishkah.org/blog/ar and http://www.mishkah.org/blog/en point to different two sites, each with a different menu and posts and blocks. but this means 2 databases or at lease two different tables, I am not sure how it works. 2) maybe I can add a taxonomy verb as language/arabic and language/english. and if there is a way to make that appear changed from a clickable url, then a user can click to show posts in english only or arabic only. but then I still have the problem of the site interface, I am not sure if an anonymous visitor can change that from a clickable url. 3) I am not really sure what the i18n module can help with in this regard. Please advice.
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
another thing: what if I want my name to be displayed in arabic in arabic posts as posted by: and in english for english posts. do I need to create 2 users for that, one with an arabic name and the other with an english name?
oops.. anther one: what if I want the option to display all the posts -but not blocks- regardless of language in the same page, so I will have three links in the language block: arabic, english and all.
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Salman