David Scotson

You mean that ln -s one/location other/location at the system level won't work? I've not actually tried it myself yet, but I can't see why Moodle would care whether it was a real file or a symbolic link. I'll report back after I've tried it myself.

edit: well I've tried it and it almost works. You get a nasty warning at the top of the files section saying:

Warning: filemtime(): Stat failed for /srv/moodledata/cvs/7//users2.xls (errno=2 - No such file or directory) in /srv/www/htdocs/moodle/cvs/files/index.php on line 726

and despite showing the file fine and allowing you to rename and move it around it later claims it can't find the file for presumably similar reasons when you try to present it as a resource.

I can't think why Moodle cares whether a file is a symbolic link or not, but there may well be a good reason.

Would a file system link not work instead? i.e. you only have one copy of the file and the others are just links pointing back to that version which you can update and the rest should change transparently.

It might be worthwile seperating out what are new problems in 1.6 and which are longstanding issues. For example, the left and right columns switching thing makes some sense (as presumably the 'most important' column should be on the left if you read left-to-right and vice-versa) but it has confused me in the past that the CSS for the left-column applies to the right column in right-to-left languages. This looks really odd unless your design is mostly symmetrical. I hadn't noticed the reversed arrows but it is probably the same problem underneath. Is anyone actually using Moodle in Arabic today? Are they working around these problems somehow?

The problems you describe in part 1, are also longstanding bugs I've had to deal with before, but they're bugs in Internet Explorer, not Moodle. I think the best thing to do would be to hope that IE7 supports Unicode better though there's probably steps you can take to minimize problems. I'm sure there are pages on the web that list common Windows fonts with coverage of different Unicode areas. That also might mean disabling the ability for people to choose fonts in the HTML editor or else they could choose things that they can see but others can't. (Though this is already a problem to some degree today, and I've never thought that letting people change fonts makes much sense in Moodle).

I think for a long time to come recommending users download either Firefox or a particular font is going to be necessary to do various language releated tasks on the web (with or without Moodle).

The View Style Information tool, available in the Web Developer Extension for Firefox, suggests the following source of the color:

http://borntogroove.org/theme/btg/styles.php

#user-index .cell    (line 787)
{
    background-color: rgb(221, 221, 221);
}

which when you look at the actual file, is this:

#user-index .cell {
  background-color:#dddddd;
}

A glance at some of the relevant Moodle code suggests it only allows the validator in when you are using the standardxhtml theme. This is a wise security precaution as otherwise it only checks the user agent (which is easy to change in many browsers).

You could change that code to the name of your theme, or change your theme to standardxhtml to test it. Just remember not to set your site live like that.