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General Questions /

General questions about getting started with SilverStripe that don't fit in any of the categories above.

Moderators: martimiz, Sean, Ed, biapar, Willr, Ingo, swaiba

Arabic and other RTL languages (Frontend Templates)

5 Posts 4276 Views

Double-A-Ron

Community Member, 607 Posts

22 January 2010 at 2:41pm

Hi guys,

I have a client who wishes to have a Translatable Arabic version of their 2.3.3 SS site.

Has anyone worked with a RTL translation? I assume that the template will need to change to allow for dynamic orientation of the text as per this article: http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/ (adding a dir="rtl" attribute to the HTML tag on the fly)

Other than that, I assume the process is the same as for a LTR language? But what about in terms of writing content in the CMS? Obviously writing translations in Arabic in the default LTR orientation is a-kin to me writing this post backwards?

sajok

Community Member, 82 Posts

26 January 2010 at 2:16am

I'm currently working on a multilingual website with Arabic and French. I made Arabic as the default and created a ltr.css file which get loaded when the user switches to French pages. In the main stylesheet I set direction to rtl and text-align to justify. That works great for me. As for the tinyMCE is set to LTR by default, I changed the directionality option to RTL in mysite/code/page.php. That's however, is not the final solution because I'll have to change the directionality back to LTR when I want to translate a page to french.. it would be great if we can change the directionality otion in the admin CMS.

Said

Double-A-Ron

Community Member, 607 Posts

26 January 2010 at 8:23am

Thanks sajok, at least I can notify the prospective customer that there is no easy way to switch bidi on the CMS side of things.

Just as a side to you, I am not sure how outdated the article I linked to is, but W3C specifically states that you should use the dedicated HTML attribute rather than CSS direction.

More on this here: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-bidi-css-markup

Aaron

sajok

Community Member, 82 Posts

26 January 2010 at 12:57pm

thank you for the link..I didn't know actually that dir attribute in <html> is better than the direction attribute in css. So in my case after doing some adjustements to my code, this if statement does the trick :

<% if Locale == ar_MA" %>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" dir="rtl">
<% else %>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" >
<% end_if %>

do you have any idea how I can change the default directionality option of TinyMCE depending on the current locale.. something like this : mysite/code/page.php

	public function getCMSFields() {
		$fields = parent::getCMSFields();
		if (locale=='ar_MA') {
		HtmlEditorConfig::get('cms')->setOption('directionality', 'rtl');
 		return $fields;
	      }
         }

Said

Double-A-Ron

Community Member, 607 Posts

26 January 2010 at 1:39pm

Not sure, but looking at the docs for both HTMLEditorConfig(http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=htmleditorconfig), and TinyMCE (http://wiki.moxiecode.com/index.php/TinyMCE:Configuration/directionality), your code looks about right. There is a note on the HTMLEditorConfig doc page that says: "Note this functionality is likely to be changed in future releases."

There is also a TinyMCE Plugin that allows the user to toggle directionality using buttons. http://wiki.moxiecode.com/index.php/TinyMCE:Plugins/directionality, but that sounds like an unnecessary mouse click to me.

As far as Silverstripe is concerned, the last post here might be a better solution to what you have come up with here (if it is not working): http://www.silverstripe.org/general-questions/show/268901#post268901

My client is not paying for this mod at present and I am under the pump on another project. So I'd be interested to know how you get on. As a non-Arabic speaker, I would also be interested to know if the interface layout of the CMS is ideal when the language is set to Arabic. I notice that navigation elements are still LTR.

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