The long waited Joomla! 1.5 has finally hit stable status

Being active (just a bit :P) on Joomla! Arabic forum I’ve noticed the need for a mechanism that allows for “group” translation of extensions.

I thought about Version control systems (CVS/SVN) but they are not very “user-friendly”, Wikis was another option that offered many needed features like

• A good degree of user friendliness.
• Multi-user ready.
• Revisions.

But I needed a way to automatically import translation files “php files in Joomla!”, so I wrote this solution.
(more…)

Update August 2nd, 2007: I will be releasing this hack in the following few days Insha’Allah.

Update September 4th, 2007: I’ve released the code on SourceForge you can access it by checking out the CVS there.
The project url: http://sourceforge.net/projects/arabic-tcpdf

CVS Checkout command

It is a known fact that Joomla! 1.0.x can export content into pdf format, however, this feature doesn’t seem to be working well when used to export Arabic content to pdf format, either windows-1256 or UTF-8 encoded.

To address this issue, The guys at the Joomla! core has moved to TCPDF library to export pdf files, this library has support for images and more importantly UTF-8 which means it can -theoritaclly speaking- be used to handle pretty much ANY langauge, This is true for many Left-To-Right languages, however, For a Right-To-Left language like Arabic the situation is quite different I’ll try to brief the problem here.
(more…)