Enabling more WYSIWYG features on WordPress 2.1

leave comment 
Posted in » Tutorials, Usability, WordPress - by Ades on May 18th, 2007

New to this blog? See our Popular Posts section to get started, we have tons of great articles that can benefit you. Don't miss the upcoming interesting articles, subscribe to our RSS.


Do you have a hard time underlining some text while posting in your blog? Do you have to always change to “source view” to add your own custom tags? Well maybe after this you don’t have to. Because there is a second set of WYSIWYG features that are hidden from users in WordPress 2.1. And you can enable them by just pressing the following short-cuts:

  • Firefox: Alt+Shift+V (Firefox)
  • Internet Explorer: Alt+V (Internet Explorer)
  • Mac OS X Firefox: Ctrl+V

Advanced Toolbar will reveal more buttons and enable the following features:

  • Text styles
  • Underline
  • Full paragaph alignment
  • Text coloring
  • Two varieties of paste (text and Word)
  • Formatting removal
  • Code cleanup
  • Custom character insertion
  • Undo/redo



I think, WP coders wanted to show only the most used features (buttons) on the toolbar. However they could have added “show more features” button or link instead of hiding the rest of the features. Many users don’t even know that these features exist and can be enabled in WordPress 2.1.

I have not tested WP 2.2, so I am not sure if this is already fixed or if 2.2 has improved toolbar. I read that many users are experiencing some bugs. So I think I will wait until there is a stable version before I upgrade my blog.

[Post to Twitter]  [Post to Delicious]  [Post to Digg]  [Post to StumbleUpon] 


Related Posts



7 Responses to “Enabling more WYSIWYG features on WordPress 2.1”

  1. By Ali on May 18, 2007

    Thanks for the tip, didn’t know this existed. I have WP 2.1.2 on another blog and it works perfectly.

  2. By kuanhoong on May 18, 2007

    Nice!. I am going to test it out now. :-)

  3. By Steve's Tech Blog on May 18, 2007

    Good tip!
    Reading the lines, I saw me. I often go to the Code tab. Like you said, hope it’s in wp2.2

  4. By admin on May 19, 2007

    Thanks guys!

  5. By Community Building Blog on May 19, 2007

    I really can’t believe that such a useful feature has been hidden away like this!

    - Marin Reed

  6. By Torsten on May 21, 2007

    I didn’t try it in WP 2.2 either, but it works fine in WP 2.1.
    I did even more, where I refered to in a post at http://www.vi-su.de/wordpress-editor-tinymce-erweitern/2007/05/14/
    Unfortunately it is in german language so it won’t really help most of you guys. So I try it in english.
    Just go to the tinyMCE Website €at http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/download.php and download the whole package. Within this package there are several plugins which you can upload into the /wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/ directory. Afterwards edit the config file tiny_mce_config.php which is located in /wp-includes/js/tinymce/
    For the example you want to use the table plugin. You will have to change
    $plugins = array(’inlinepopups’, ‘autosave’, ’spellchecker’, ‘paste’, ‘wordpress’);
    into
    $plugins = array(’inlinepopups’, ‘autosave’, ’spellchecker’, ‘paste’, ‘table’, ‘wordpress’);

    Now you have to load the button for the table. You will do it with
    $mce_buttons_3 = apply_filters(’mce_buttons_3′, array(’tablecontrols’));
    $mce_buttons_3 = implode($mce_buttons_3, ‘,’);

    That’s it. With a click of a button you can define a table within the editor now.
    Hope it was at least a little bit helpful and understandable in my poor english.

  7. By admin on May 21, 2007

    Thanks for the tip Torsten! I have known tinymce for some time now, but I didn’t know it could be integrated to WP so easily.


Post a Comment