The case scenario

The typical scenario with WordPress and languages is the following :
You get your private hosting, you rush away to your control panel , go to goodies like fantastico tools, install wordpress with the click of a button ! ( who wouldn’t do that ? )
You start blogging… but then after a while, you read an article about the importance of localization and about the millions of users who speak only arabic , so you decide it is time to add some arabic content or to participate in some translation/coverage/live-tweeting event in order to lurk those millions of visitors to your site.

Swiftly, you load yamli, copy paste the text, push the publish button…. but all you will be getting is :
” ????? ?? ?????????? ???? ?????? ??????????? ”

My advice for you is to run to your first geek friend and ask. If no one is online or if everyone is ignoring you , here is an explanation and a solution to your problem

Explanation

Fantastico installed a database for wordpress to use , this database has a “language” , it means that it can contain specific set of characters, you have swedish, chinese, latin, arabic encoding for example. The technical term is “collation” , you can grab a full description about it here

Solution :

Since the WordPress-install tool by default doesn’t tell ur database to understand arabic, what you have to do is simply change this setting in your database .
Sadly, from my experience so far , changing the collation for the database only won’t work ! you will have to change the fields collation manually – check the presentation for a step by step guide

step1: Login to your control panel / hosting – select MySQL database management tool

step2: find phpMyAdmin and click it

step3: select your database

step4 : select the table

step5 : select the field

step 7 : modify the collation

If you are still having trouble, don’t hesitate to contact me :)

The first day at arabnet was thrilling, many many interesting speakers, brilliant ideathoners and impressive startuppers, it was a great space to meet very interesting people blablabla

Now that the nice introduction is done , time to skip to a more in depth review of how things were going

The first thing that i would NOT like to discuss is that the whole ARAB net was happening in ENGLISH and it was not only the speakers, but also the english twitter panel on live-tweeting was way more active than the arabic one

So i will not elaborate on this point and move on to a detailed overview :

I got started adding the new authentication plugins that i need to write – this post contains boring details – you have been warned before reading more, so if you are brave