Rural Blog docsAll pages

Right-to-left languages

Set Settings → General → Site Language to an RTL locale — Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu — and WordPress puts dir="rtl" on the document.

Be aware of what that does and does not give you. The theme’s own strings translate cleanly and the text direction is correct, but the theme does not ship a mirrored stylesheet, so parts of the layout keep their left-to-right arrangement. Plan for a small amount of CSS of your own.

What works out of the box

What you should check, and probably adjust

The stylesheet is written with physical left / right properties, so anything positioned rather than flowed keeps its side:

A modest block of CSS under an html[dir="rtl"] prefix covers most of it. See Custom CSS for where to put it, or Create a child theme if it grows past a handful of rules.

Settings that are named for physical sides

These say left and right, and they mean the physical left and right — not “start” and “end”. On an RTL site you generally want the opposite of what you would pick for English:

Setting For an RTL site
Blog / post / page layout Sidebar left is the sidebar after the content
Stacked alignment Right is the reading-start edge
Post header alignment Same
Page title alignment Same

Fonts

The nine built-in stacks are Latin-focused. Leave the face on System default, which resolves to a font the device actually has for your script.

If you want a specific typeface, install it through the Font Library and check that it covers your script — a Latin-only webfont falls back silently for every Arabic or Hebrew character, giving you two typefaces in one paragraph.

Reporting problems

If you are running the theme in an RTL locale, specific reports are genuinely useful — a screenshot and the element that is on the wrong side is enough to get it fixed. See Support.