A rant on the WordPress editor
Today I am going to write a negative post (a rant, bombast, diatribe, tirade, all found on the wonderful thesaurus.com) about the wysiwyg rich text editor of WordPress. I don’t like to write negative stuff, but just need to get this off my chest.
I wrote a post yesterday about effective presentation. It had two youtube videos embedded within. I formatted everything properly with the Windows Live Writer which is a wonderful editor. At about 11.30pm (UTC+8), I publish the post to the blog. Everything was ok when I view it in my browser. As I read through, I find that one of my subheadings is not bold, so I switch over to the WordPress editor to add the bold tag.
After I publish again, all hell breaks loose. The paragraphs got mash up together. The youtube videos caused uneven CSS style. Trying to save it using the Wordpress editor is useless as it seems to have a self correcting system that deletes irrelevant code. Basically, the editor had an auto-immune disease.
I took one hour to write that post and another hour to try to save it.
From WordPress own Codex:
- Use a Text Editor to Edit Files
- If you will be making changes to files outside of the built-in [[]]File Editor, use a text editor. DO NOT USE A WORD PROCESSING PROGRAM. Word processors change the quote marks to characters and may convert other characters or bring in unwanted code which will cause the file to break when used. There are also some HTML generator programs that should not be used for similar reasons.
That is good advice. Just apply it to your own WYSIWYG editor.
Now, for something more constructive.
How I formatted it back.
I just re-publish it from Windows Live Writer. I got everything back the way they are. You can also edit in a text editor, as suggested in the block quote above, then paste everything back. The key point is you must not edit it again within the WordPress editor, as it will attack the code again.
The same goes for the scripts within the post. Like Amazon or Auction Ads scripts. Once you add it in and publish, you must not edit it within the WordPress environment. It will rearrange the script to conform to its code structure and the ads will not show up after you re-publish.
Hope you find this useful. If you know of any other solutions to this or you disagree, please send in your comments for discussion.
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