Archive for June 2007

Even these days, WordPress will often mess with HTML code entered into posts or pages. The most persistent problem I’ve found has been its penchant for inserting <br /> tags inside forms.

No, I’ve not found a way to stop it. Just a slightly lateral workaround: create the following generic class in your stylesheet and apply it to any form (or other containing element) where unwanted <br />s are being slipped in:

.nobr br {display: none;}

If you’re using <br /> tags yourself in that bit… well, you can always use a bit of a margin, eh?

Being a die-hard hand-coder, WYSIWYG editors irk me. It’s partly an irrational “Get your mits off my code!” thing, but it’s often very practical.

Working with WordPress, many of the sites I deploy for clients need specific layout code within the editable content of WP-managed pages. The code is necessary, and the clients are savvy enough to work around my HTML when they edit their copy.

WP’s visual editor, however, isn’t. It switches any <div> for a <p>, and otherwise messes stuff up. Maybe there’s a way to coax it into being less interfering. But for now I just need to get the visual editor out the way.

In theory that’s fine – each user just has to uncheck the visual editor box on their WordPress profile. It’s set to be checked by default when a new user is created. It already happened several times that a client has forgotten to do this, gone to edit a tiny bit of copy on the delicately coded home page, only for the editor to mess it all up.

Can’t I just set visual editing to be “off” by default?

Here’s how. In the file wp-admin/admin-functions.php, change line 522 from this:

$user->rich_editing = 'true';

To (unsurprisingly) this:

$user->rich_editing = 'false';