Installing a Hebrew Joomla web site has been discussed in several Israeli forums but unfortunately when i needed all the information it was quite hectic trying to find it all organized in one tutorial, therefore i have decided to make a tutorial of my own on how to install a new Hebrew Joomla web site directly on your server.

Important!
After opening a new db in H-sphere directly on the server - edit that specific db and go to phpMyAdmin > choose your specific db on the side list > click on the top tab Operation > at the bottom of the page change the collation to utf8_general_ci.
(The db has to be empty to do so, therefore you should do this before installing Joomla.)

Database Settings
Open a new database.
Go to phpMyAdmin and make sure that

MySQL Connection Collation = utf8_general_ci

New Domain Settings
Open a new domain.
Upload the Joomla installation zip file.
Uncompress the zip file in the directory.

Joomla Settings
Install Joomla as usual.
At the End of the installation - delete the install directory.

Language Settings
Upload Hebrew.php + Hebrew.xml + Hebrew.ignore to the Language directory via FTP (I’m not so sure about uploading the English files as well but i don’t think it could hurt…so lets do it.)
Go to includes > database.php
In row 102 simply delete the comment sign

@mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $this->_resource);

Go to file configuration.php and change these settings

mosConfig_lang='hebrew';
mosConfig_locale='he_IL.utf-8';

Creating Language Files (…in case i need to format my comp and i cant find any backup)
Download the Hebrew language zip file.
Open the files in Notepad2 (do not use the regular Notepad program) > Save as > keep the original name of the file > set encoding to utf-8 instead of ASCII.
Also change the ISO from windows-1255 to utf-8 and charset=utf-8.

Go to Joomla Admin > Language Manager > change the default language setting to Hebrew.
Create an RTL template.

That’s it!

Tags: Joomla tips

Posted in May 20th, 2008 by Busyboo | Website Design |