Yesterday when I’ve published the announcement about launch of European Roadshow sites I’ve neglected to emphasize an important part of that tiresome day. Today, I’d like to fill that gap by sharing some insight with you. I hope we’re all on the same page.

While I together with Valon were working on Come to Europe site I hear him shouting out loud complains about WordPress “Write Post” visual editor. Honestly, this wasn’t the first-in-the-row complain for I’ve had talks to few other colleagues who weren’t feeling comfortable while trying to write down an article from within WordPress. Well, I had to react though for first of all I like to help and feel glad about it, second of all he’s my manager and basically I must had assisted, wasn’t I ?!

For most bloggers using WordPress “Write Post” editor is annoying, and I’m pretty much aware that the visual editor is gimpy, yet it can be improved. Although the improvement should have been done by WordPress developers, which certainly hasn’t, though we are forced to do it manually by using extra plug-ins. Indeed, it’s not really that bad but sometimes adds additional unwanted html tags that alter the look of the post plus switching from the Visual to plain HTML editor to clean them up is a nerve breaker.

write001

Hence, I told him what I am about going to tell you here what one should do if still insists on using “Write Post” rather then switching to whatever 3rd party alternatives. This is what, read ahead.

The easiest and simplest action through which you can lower down the annoyance and give yourself a little more comfort from the buggy TinyMCE used in WordPress is by turning off the visual editor. You can do this with the following steps -> login to your WP dashboard and click your name on the top-right of the page

user_profile

Then in the Personal Options section uncheck “Use the visual editor when writing”

visual_editor

Finally click the update button to save the changes.
And this is all about it, now you’re not going to see Visual Editor unless you re-enable it again. But remember from now on you’re going to need to type a little more coding tags than you used to for advanced editing capabilities now are disabled.

The second alternative is appropriate only if you’re an avid to the Visual Editor and insist on using it again and again, or simply you find it pretty convenient, and right there is the solution for you too. Thank God there are such generous plug-in developers who offer us free plug-ins to improve and ease our work experience.

The plug-in I use (I’m not aware of a better one until today) is called TinyMCE Advanced (click to read more about it) which adds extra advanced functionality to the Visual Editor by extending it’s worthiness. Below is a screenshot of TinyMCE Advanced configuration panel with the extra options that come with it.

To put it into work simply

  1. Download.
  2. Unzip.
  3. Upload to the plugins directory (wp-content/plugins).
  4. Activate the plugin.
  5. Set your preferences at “Manage – TinyMCE Advanced”.
  6. Clear your browser cache.

Finally, after this you’ll feel more confident while preparing a post from within WordPress “Write Post” page plus no annoyances will occur throughout the process. Personally when not writing from my laptop I do use Write Post page to publish my articles, certainly with TinyMCE Advanced enabled, running smoothly and safely.

Share
Delicious
Save