Default WordPress visual editor to “off” for new users

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’;

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 5:47 pm.
Filed under wordpress.