The WordPress Jetpack plugin recently (and experimentally) added “Writing Prompts” like those seen on WordPress.com-hosted sites since…I wanna say 2020?

I’ve been thinking about getting more into “Personal Blogging” elsewhere, and I figured these would be useful in getting words out.

In order to get these prompts on a self-hosted WordPress site, you need to do three things:

1. Upgrade to JetPack 11.7 or higher
2. Add the following line of code to your wp-config.php file:
   

   define( 'JETPACK_EXPERIMENTAL_BLOCKS', true );

3. Go to “Settings > Writing” in WordPress admin, and check the box labeled “Show a writing prompt when starting a new post.”

I don’t know when this is supposed to become available without Step (2), but at that point it might be a good idea to turn off Experimental Blocks by removing that line.

Internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) are important and often overlooked aspects of WordPress development. Themes should give developers and administrators the ability to add translations for users from among the roughly 95% of the world whose first language isn’t English.

There are plenty of articles written about how to provide i18n and l10n for a single theme, but what about child themes? When building a child theme, assuming the parent theme is properly internationalized, developers may want to do any or all of the following:

1. Provide localizations that aren’t provided by the parent theme, either in different languages or in gaps in existing localizations.
2. Modify existing localizations in the parent theme, for instance if the developer of the child theme wants to change the wording of some area of the site.
3. Provide new internationalizations unique to the child theme, using the child theme’s text domain.

Let’s start by looking at a simple example of i18n in a WordPress theme. For the purposes of this article, the parent theme will be called “Parent Theme” with the text domain parenttheme, and the child theme will be called “Child Theme” with the text domain childtheme.

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