Advanced WYSIWYG modification

I’ve been using this plugin for a while now to take the place of WP’s default editor because it’s too plain and it’s missing some features. Problem was after installing the plugin it looked like crap and I ended up modifying it as well.

Now I made somewhat more extensive modification and added lots of things while keeping buttons included in the default editor — like the “More” button for example — y expanding the available options.

You start with this:

Wordpress WYSIWYG original

Then it changes to this after installing the unmodified plugin:

Advanced WYSIWYG original

It’s pretty obvious keeping that setup is out of the question, so I hacked it a bit, removed some things and added others… but I recently got tired of having to change to the code editor to use stuff like the “More” button or remove formatting

After a bit of poking I ended up with this:

Advanced WYSIWYG mod

As you can see we now have two rows of buttons but keep WP stuff like the “More” button and the spellchecker and keep plugin stuff like the foreground/background modifyers… and get some extras like the table editor and the formatting eraser.

If you’re interested you can download the modified file here. If you install and activate it the way it is you’ll end up with something like this:

Modified Advanced WYSIWIG with some missing features

To have all the available features you need to do some work:

  1. First download TinyMCE here. Doesn’t matter if it’s the tarfile or the zip, they contain exactly the same files
  2. Uncompress the file and go to the plugins directory. Using FTP upload the “table” and “xhtmlxtras” directory to the location wp-includesjstinymceplugins on your host. Directory “wp-includes” is located on the WordPress root folder.
  3. Go write a new post and voilá. If you had already uploaded and activated the modified plugin you must refresh the page manually using the reload/refresh button on your browser, or you can press F5

With that done you now should have the full set of buttons. If you paid some attention you should have seen many more plugins for TinyMCE. You can add those functions but you need to do it manually editing the plugin PHP file and uploading the corresponding directories to the TinyMCE plugins folder. One that could be useful for sites that constantly use the same code over and over is the “template” plugin. After creating — and making sure it works — the template just fill up the blank spots and you’re done, like event sites or WordPress MU. If you want to add your own buttons you’ll want to look at the plugin documentation and the button reference for the available buttons.

I don’t think I broke anything when I made the modifications and I tested it on WP 2.1 and 2.1.2. For Suggestions and yelps use the comments.

1 thought on “Advanced WYSIWYG modification”

  1. What it took to get me to test this out on WP 2.3.3 was someone asking for help in the #WordPress channel on FreeNode IRC. So there, the plugin works on WP 2.3.3

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