MomizatDocumentation

Arabic and right-to-left sites

Run Goodnews in Arabic or another RTL language: what the theme ships, and what it does not.

Goodnews has supported right-to-left layouts since version 4 of the theme, and has shipped an Arabic translation since version 5.6, in December 2014. Version 5.12.0 repairs and extends that support; it does not introduce it.

Switching the site to Arabic or RTL

Goodnews follows WordPress's own site language setting. There is nothing Goodnews-specific to turn on.

  1. Go to Settings → General.
  2. Set Site Language to Arabic, or another right-to-left language.
  3. Save. The theme switches to its RTL stylesheet automatically.
WordPress General Settings with Site Language set to Arabic.

You do not need a separate RTL theme or plugin. WordPress marks any right-to-left language as such, and Goodnews reads that flag directly.

What the current release fixes

Version 5.12.0's Arabic and RTL work is corrective. The items below were either wrong before this release or had never been done at all:

  • Goodnews now ships its own Arabic typeface, IBM Plex Sans Arabic, served from your own site rather than fetched from Google on every page load.
  • Arabic body text is set in an Arabic font at an Arabic size, rather than falling back to the Latin font stack.
  • Arabic headings no longer overflow their line boxes once diacritics (tashkeel) are added.
  • Dates render in Arabic order rather than Latin order.
  • 447 corrections were made to the theme's own Arabic translation strings.
  • Several right-to-left layout defects were fixed: a grid column that did not reverse direction, the post date colliding with the comment count, and a handful of surfaces that were rendering Arabic text in a Latin display font.
Goodnews front page in Arabic, laid out right to left.
Arabic article heading and body text set in IBM Plex Sans Arabic.

What is not complete

The theme's own Arabic translation is not finished. Roughly a quarter of the theme's interface strings — labels, buttons, and messages the theme itself outputs — still display in English on an Arabic site. This release corrected specific errors in the translation; it did not translate what was missing.

There is no importable Arabic demo. An earlier version of Goodnews shipped a right-to-left demo inside the one-click importer. That feature was removed when the demo importer was rebuilt in 2019, and it has not been restored. The demo you can import today — see Importing the demo content — is the English one. If you build an Arabic site, you are building its content from scratch or importing the English demo and translating it yourself.

There is a live Arabic site running Goodnews at goodnews-rtl.momizat.com — a reference to look at, not something you can import.

Translating the rest of the theme

To fill in the missing strings, or to translate Goodnews into a different language entirely, see Translating the theme.