Rayed's Real Life

I’ve just upgraded my Blogging software to WordPress latest version 2.5

Since I skipped a version I noticed huge improvements, tags, widgets, new dashboard, new interfaces, more info in this post WordPress 2.5

Every Eid vacation I end up with an extra free time, I usually use it to learn new stuff, the latest vacation I decided to learn Drupal. Drupal is a Content management system (CMS), it is basically a software to help you manage your content.

Drupal is a modular and customizable CMS, you can use it to build different types of web sites, a Blog, company or organization web site, community website, you name it.

Since last year Abdullah Aldosari start working with Drupal, and as always he started marketing it as the best invention ever, and as always I argued with him that building your own CMS is better, and as always I was wrong Drupal is the best invention ever!! okay I am bit exaggerating but please don’t do my mistake, if you are building a new website find your self a CMS and customize it.

Customizing a CMS isn’t that hard, it would be much easier than building everything from scratch, and it will give you many features that you didn’t even think of. Drupal Features

Of course you don’t have to use CMS for every website you build, in many situations it is better to build your own stuff or use a framework instead of CMS. Check Is Drupal right for you to help you decide

rayed.com to new server with upgraded softwares:
FreeBSD 6.2
Apache 2
PHP 5
MySQL 5

Today me and Abdullah launched Muntaqa.

Muntaqa is a website that collect large number of email groups, e.g. AbuNawaf, and displays them in a single page, people can vote, bookmark, and comment on all emails.

In the front page you will get the most popular emails, so you want miss any interesting emails in the Arabic web sphere

Muntaqa works like Digg, but instead of submitting websites, we automatically submit emails from email groups. A big population of computer users in Arab world (at least in Saudi Arabia) still consider the emails as the only form of publishing in the Internet.

Emails are viewed in their original form with all the ads in the original email, we don’t want to hurt group owners business.

On of the cool new features of WordPress 2.1 is “Front Page” options it allows you to make WordPress front page a static page instead of showing latest post.
This make WordPress suitable as CMS for small websites, without any heavy customizations.

In my blog I write in both languages English and Arabic, but I have to switch text direction from the template default English direction “Left to Right” to Arabic “Right to Left”.
One way do to it is to add HTML tags in each Arabic entry.
Another way to do it is to utilize WordPress “Custom Fields” feature, WordPress allows you to add custom fields to any entry, so I add a new custom field to my Arabic entries, the key will be “wp_direction” and the value will be “rtl”.
Then from my template I modify “index.php” and add the following code inside the posts loop:

< ?php
$direction = get_post_custom_values('wp_direction');
$style_dir = $direction[0]=='rtl'? ' style="direction:rtl;" ' : '';
?>

Then use “$style_dir” value to switch the text direction on all relevant tags.

UPDATE: As Steve stated in his comment, you might want to change “single.php” template also. Thanks Steve.

My dear Friend Fahad AlShenaifi finally found a time to launch his blog, http://fahadblog.com/wordpress/

The blog in English, and talk about Ubuntu, computer security, and him self.

Don’t miss his photo gallery.