Provides a theme-independent administration interface (aka. navigation, back-end). It's a helper for novice users coming from other CMS, a time-saver for site administrators, and useful for developers and site builders.
Administrative links are displayed in a CSS/JS-based menu at the top on all pages of your site. It not only contains regular menu items — tasks and actions are also included, enabling fast access to any administrative resource your Drupal site provides.
What makes it even better is that it comes with RTL support(perfect!). There's a problem though with its D7 release candidate: the RTL just doesn't work well. Just when I was just about to scan the CSS to fix it, I found out that someone has already done the job. The solution can be found in this submitted issue: "No dropdown menus in RTL language"; hejazee submitted the magical patch at comment #34 and it works perfectly!
This patch is based on the development release, so make sure you install the dev release before applying it. Enjoy =)
Twitter Bootstrap is a very nice HTML/CSS/JavaScript front-end toolkit that is full featured with grid and responsive layouts and many UI components. They say it's "Designed for everyone, everywhere.", but I have to strongly disagree; it has no RTL support.
The good news is: Abdullah Diaa(from Egypt) was super nice to add the RTL support to the Twitter Bootstrap and upload it for us to enjoy. Check it out at his github repo.
There's nothing I love more than stumbling upon web developers who are passionate about RTLing the web =)
UPDATE: Thanks saeed for the notice. Twitter Bootstrap v2.3.1 can now be downloaded at Hamed Ramezanian's github repo.
Since everyone is talking about developing for mobile these days and how it became a must, jQuery released the "jQuery Mobile" framework that is:
A unified, HTML5-based user interface system for all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation. Its lightweight code is built with progressive enhancement, and has a flexible, easily themeable design.
My only(and huge) problem with it is that it lacks any RTL support. Luckily, Moutaz Shams decided to do something about it and RTLed the framework. Now how cool is that? =)
Remember the WordPress plugin:The RTLer? Well its author l0uy re-released yesterday the tool as a standalone web service so you can RTL any CSS you need.
But remember, it gives you an overridden RTLed CSS you include in addition to the LTR version, like below:
To change the language of a WordPress site, just update the WPLANG constant in your wp-config.php file:
define ('WPLANG', 'ar'); //changes the language of the site to Arabic
But this will change the language of both of your Front End and Back End. Separating these two was not possible if it weren't for this WP plugin by Louay(same author of The RTLer): Admin Locale.
Just go to Settings » General and choose your language.
Note: Of course you'll need to install a localized version of WordPress so you can get the language files. Arabic WordPress can be downloaded from http://ar.wordpress.org
WordPress has this very easy and straight forward logic when it comes to RTLing themes. It simply checks for the direction of the language you're using in your WP installation, if it happens to be 'rtl'(Arabic for example) it includes the stylesheet rtl.css if it exists. This means that RTLing a WP theme is creating this rtl.css file. A detailed tutorial is coming up soon about RTLing WP themes
Louy who writes by the way at Ardroid, WordPress Codex and Global Voices wrote a Wordpress Plugin that creates this rtl.css for you. He called it the RTLer(well of course):
RTLer, is just a simple plugin that generates the RTL stylesheet rtl.css for you from your theme's style.css file.
Check the RTLer out at the WordPress Plugin Directory.
Can't express our happiness about the reaction we've been getting so far. Getting feedback and links to blogs that have been RTLed with the help of the tutorials posted here was just more than amazing *if you could just see the smile on my face right now*.
Special thanks to Moh'd Sahli who was very kind to send me the link to his guide[ar] he prepared during the "Code Sprint" Event which was held in May 2009 in Cairo.
The support this project received from the Arab Techies was amazing. Manal was great to send me the link to this Drupal Module "Jquery Bidi" which:
Uses Jquery to automatically set directionality attributes of HTML elements based on first strongly directional letter in the element.
I will say it again here..I look at this project as a learning experience, I thought of starting it because I couldn't find enough sources about RTL for me to learn from. So if anyone has an idea, tutorial or project you're more than welcome to join :)
Annoyed by the way Arabic conversations look like in Gtalk? Tech-World "عالم التقنية" published 4 themes you can use to enhance your chatting experience in Arabic. Check it there:
Actually I made up this "verb" (I'm sure I'm not alone :)) to describe the process of converting an LTR (left to right) webpage to an RTL webpage. You'll see RTLing in action in all of the multilingual websites(English/Arabic for example) and in this blog as well. Click the العربية link in the top to see the page flipped.
Okay now how do I RTL?
When you want to write an Arabic document (an RTL document), the first the you do when you open a word processing application (MS Word, Notepad etc) is flipping the direction and get going. Well in the Front End Web Development world it's pretty much the same thing. It's all about flipping. It's about replacing the 'left' with a 'right' in your webpage.
If it's that simple, why this blog?
For many reasons:
Not everyone knows how to flip the "Web Page"
Not everyone has the time to flip it
The flipping isn't simple sometimes, you have many Web Browsers and many Versions of these Web Browsers that you must test your flipped page to
Some of the "left" values in the webpage "code" don't have a "right" equivalent
..and many others that can't be covered here and now
To Sum up...
Now that you know what RTLing is...everything else you'll be reading on this blog will be about "RTLing" the web. What would like to see 'RTLed' the most? templates? widgets? anything else? Choose an option from the Voting Poll on the right or share your comments here.
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