Ahmad Al-Obaidy IRAQI open sourcer

I've always wanted to blog about the books I read in Arabic. Yet only yesterday, I decided to add bi-directional text formatting to this site, in order to render Arabic posts properly.

Bi-directional text formatting means that the CMS will render any Arabic paragraphs from right to left automatically in any post, and yet to keep English paragraphs direction from left to right. A simple example for right to left Arabic text:

هذا السطر مجرد توضيح لعرض الكتابة من اليمين الى اليسار.

I knew there was BIDI module developed by an Egyptian developer (Alaa) doing that already. But the module was old and hasn't been ported to the new version of Drupal. After googling the Web, I found a fork which has been ported to Drupal 6.x.

To add the module:
1. Download the files from http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/sandbox/msameer/modules/bidi/
2. Upload the BIDI folder to the modules folder in you site.
3. Enable the BIDI module from the administration section of Drupal.
4. Add the BIDI filter to the default input format.

And voila, you have bi-direction support in your site.