Take back control of the WordPress post editor
If you care about the quality of your site’s code, don’t use the built-in visual editor to write your posts or pages. It bastardizes your code, and from a Web standards and search engine perspective, you’ll be way off in left field.
To take control of your posts and your code, tame that visual editor. Go to your profile (under Users) and remove the check mark beside “Use the visual editor when writing”.
When writing posts or pages now, you’ll be presented with the Code window only, giving you complete control.
Adding more buttons to the post editor
Notice the limited number of buttons in the editor… b, i, link, etc.
In days gone by WordPress bloggers (myself included) would edit a file called quicktags.js to add their own custom buttons, or quicktags, to the existing set you see above. Today, as with all good WordPress ideas, we have a plugin to do it for us.
Grab yourself a copy of AddQuicktag, a WordPress plugin which allows you to add or remove custom “Quicktags” to the editor with ease.
Upload it to your plugin directory and activate it. Once activated, click on “Options ยป Add Quicktags” to add a new tag. Give it a label (displayed on the button), an opening tag and a closing tag.
For example, to create a new quicktag button for my dropcap code, which is used at the beginning of every post, I added the following:
- Button Label - dropcap
- Start Tag - <span class=”dropcap”>
- End Tag - </span>
I’ve also added buttons for h2, h3 and h4 in the same way. It’s a great way to quickly insert frequently used code when composing a post.
Thinking “outside the box”, this is a very useful plugin.
Comments
Very good post. Well written.
Wow, very nice post. I had the first part down, turning off the visual editor, but the adding more buttons part was new to me. That plugin looks pretty good. Well done, sir.
Thank you both. Glad you found it helpful.
[...] an earlier post I discussed taking control of the WordPress post editor and adding custom buttons (Quicktags). I [...]
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