I just implement a new theme for my personal blog and publish it in drupal.org: Interactive Media. Similar as my other 2 projects (Contented7 and Internet Services), this new theme also coming with RTL supporting for Drupal 6.x. I test all 3 themes with FF3 Beta5, Opera9.2 and IE7, both LTR and RTL should looks fine. Thanks for Zohar and your site, without your help all this RTL development can't be successful :)
Well, some tips for RTL theme development:
- You need to find a friend with a RTL Drupal site for testing. This is very important or else you can't test your progress. A simple FTP access and a drupal account which able to select personal theme should be enough for this purpose.
- Remember to test with Opera9.2 and Firefox (at least FF3 Beta5). Because this 2 browser are both cross platform and pass with Acid2 test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2), their RTL CSS implementation is much correct and looks logical. IE7 may/may not display RTL correctly so don't start your RTL development with it. Even FF2 will display RTL CSS wrongly.
- First develop your theme and CSS as compatible with CSS2 standard (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/), before fine tune it for other browsers. From my point of view, unless include individual browser-specific-hack CSS file for each browser (e.g. for IE6/7 and FF2), your theme can never compatible with ALL well known browsers within single simple code base. If you have a team or a lot of active RTL contributors for your theme development, feel free to work it out; or else just simply indicate your theme's RTL support Acid2 compatible browser ONLY, and let others to contribute.
The development for RTL is not too complicated; so if you have time to consider the others needs, just try to work your Drupal 6.x theme with RTL support. My experience of development time required is around 80%/20% (LTR/RTL), and spend totally 3 days for develop Interactive Media from sketch with reference to my other old themes skeleton :)
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