So, I'm the first to pickup Vicenç's invitation and make it here?

Anyway, I'd like to open for discussion the issue of lacking support for RTL languages (languages written from right-to-left, such as Arabic and Hebrew) - Currently DNN has no features to assist in proper localization of RTL strings/content and users need to resort to all sorts of tricks to get such content displayed correctly.

The way to get RTL content displayed correctly on an HTML page, is by using the "direction:rtl" CSS style rule on the containing element - this horizontally flips all of the element's content (including the ordering of table cells, etc.). the style is inherited by all containing elements, so only the top most element concerns us. of course, special care must be taken in cases where we have mixed RTL and LTR content or other special cases such as having tables which we don't want to flip, so it's not enough to just plaster "direction:rtl" on each tab.

I think perhaps a text-direction property should be added to the languages section of DNN, so that it would be possible to assign the writing direction of each language. Afterwards, we could use this property to conditionally assign CSS classes/style rules to have content properly displayed based on the selected language. Core user interface elements should include this conditional assignment of RTL styles.

Another area which requires special support for RTL languages is that of email notifications - emails need to be sent out in HTML, and there should be a way to mark the outgoing HTML as RTL. In addition to this, currently emails use the hosting machine's default language for encoding, which results in the recipient getting garbled characters in cases where a foreign language site is hosted on a machine with English as the default language (this issue affects all languages using special characters, not just RTL).

Well, that's all for now. I'll add anything else that comes to mind. If there are any other users of RTL languages with similar problems, please feel free to add your suggestions for possible solutions.

Opher.

The easiest solution would be to allow the admin to select the required encoding for the email (either by selecting one of the defined locales within DNN or by using the encoding setting in the web.config). Currently emails are encoded based on the server default language, and this is bad, since alot of localized sites are being hosted with North-American service providers.

Hi,

The best way (and most flexible) is to enable RTL LTR selection in FTB.
the issue is that I didn't find the way to do it yet.

in additional to that you should be able to control the direction of the container body from the Module Setting
currently I changed the container body direction (to RTL) in the css of specific containers that I use for RTL,

but this is not enough since the FTB is not effected and though the display IS RTL the editing is LTR, that make the editing very difficult (specially when tables involved) unless you add <div dir=rtl> in the HTML tab.

If FTB will support RTL LTR selection, and you'll be able to control container body from the setting screen (and not from css) the only issue that will remain is menu direction - which is minor.

Dan