RTL CSS

When we RTLed the GD Star Rating Wordpress Plugin, we only added support for the default size of the icons(which is the 24px). In this quick and short post, we'll add support to the rest of the sizes so far: 12px, 16px, 20px, 30px and 48px. And since it's a small post, I'll show you how it's RTLed.

Thank you Rami for the suggestion.

Superfish is a very famous jQuery plugin that allows you to add eye-catching effects to dropdown menus (<ul>). It works perfectly in major browsers (including IE6 with some style limitations) too. Well in RTL..it's just not there..so we're going to RTL this one.

There are three major ways I prefer to use when RTLing a webpage. Each one has its own pros and cons. They are actually the same..flipping CSS properties and rules is the same procedure in all ways. What's different is where and how are we flipping them.

GD Star Rating is a WordPress plugin that allows your blog readers to rate your posts and pages. It is extremely flexible when it comes to appearance and language support*. Graphics and text are controllable via the plugin dahsboard. Even in RTL, the rating block is properly aligned (not 100%).

The Twitter updates widget is maybe the most popular widget you can find on blogs. You can get yours from your settings page or by going to the goodies page and choosing widgets. Customizing it is super easy, you get to choose the colors, width and style of the widget itself. The direction though is always LTR. The good thing about the twitter is that it doesn't break in the RTL pages and it looks just fine. But to tweeples who tweet mostly in RTL languages (Like Arabic), it kind of doesn't fit in the RTL content of the whole page. Therefore, it's nice to see it flipped to go with the flow of their RTL page and tweets (what we are going to do now).

Using backgrounds in CSS gives you the ability to control its position. It is done by controlling its position relativly to the 0,0 point which is the top left corner of the block. If you're rule has a background-position value of left top for example, flipping it to be right top wouldn't be a problem since right is a valid value.

 Silverlight recipes is into RTL as well. Learn how to add RTL support to Silverlight there. Thanks Shady for the link.

RTLing

Now we'll start flipping the CSS. Copy the ltr folder and rename the new one rtl (It's ready in the Source you'll download, you can move it to another place if you want to practice it yourself).

In the index.html file change the path of the css file from ltr/styles.css to rtl/styles.css (what we did here is linking the new file we're going to flip)

Open the styles.css file in your new rtl folder to start flipping it.

Now that everything is ready (a browser and a simple editor), we can start RTLing the simple hello world page. I'll be using Firefox and Notepad++ in this tutorial.

The SRC of this tutorial is available at the end of this post. You'll find the HTML file with both LTR and RTL stylesheets and images.