“Arrggh!!! F***ing WordPress!!! Why won’t it just leave my damned formatting be????”
Sound familiar? Then you may be suffering from a well known affiliate affliction known as “WordPress Formatting Rage”. Commonly experienced right after you’ve spent an age carefully positioning text or images to create a landing page that is the very epitome of perfection – right up until you hit the save button. At this point WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor code cleanup thingamyjig springs into action like a lithe gazelle and proclaims “Oh ho!! Look at all those line breaks. We don’t want those cluttering up the place do we?”
The result is often less than pleasing and results in a frustrating few minutes spent laboriously re-entering those line breaks (It just must have been a mistake after all. What system would be silly enough to remove them?). This then brings us back to the first line of the post with a few extra profanities added to reflect the increase in general frustration levels.
Fortunately There is a Fix
Tiny MCE Advanced (download & more info here)
Simply install this wonderous little plugin, and select the “Stop removing my damned well line breaks” option which is located in the big red box on the plugin admin page.
You can then enjoy the bliss that is being able to add line breaks wherever you please as well as having access to some other cool additions such as emoticons, search and replace functionality whilst editing, support for tables, and heaps more.
“Ahhhh…. that’s better!!”
April 7th, 2010 at 10:57 am
Great post – i’m so glad I stumbled upon it. I have been getting really annoyed with wordpress messing up my HTML that i’ve spent hours on in my local html editor. I never even thought there was a fix for it.
Thank you!
April 7th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
That sounds exactly what I was looking for – so sick and tired of my s being removed!
I’ll be giving this a try
April 8th, 2010 at 7:18 am
Cheers Kirsty, another plugin that might be worth mentioning is “After The Deadline” which is a pretty good spell checker – saves manually checking it in Word if, like me, your not the best when it comes to spelling.
April 8th, 2010 at 9:09 am
Hi Kirsty.
Another weapon in your arsenal should be htmLawed, which will strip out all daft and broken tags, as well as any gumph that comes with a copy and paste from word (we’ve all done it).
http://www.mattvarone.com/wordpress/output-clean-valid-xhtml/ – very easy, really effective
April 8th, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Nice one Kirsty, was about tearing my hair out over this the other evening!
April 9th, 2010 at 10:59 am
The plugin sounded just what I’ve been looking for. I downloaded it and installed it, but unfortunately it has messed up my WordPress dashboard a bit.
For example, when I choose to write a new post or page, or edit an old post/page the area that I type the content into is double the width as normal, with the “update post” etc on the right hand side overlapping it…
Anybody else having problems with it?
April 9th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
Thanks for the tip Kirsty!
Same situation here. Left tearing my hair out with the way WordPress messes up our formatting. Me and my colleagues have to spend ages trying to make sure everything appears properly.
Is there a recommended plug-in to have a superior WYSIWYG form to enter blog posts rather than the regular WordPress one? We tried a couple but they were buggy.
April 14th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
I find that if you never use the wisiwig it only destroys your code by putting line breaks in…
Drives me mad.
Thanks!
April 21st, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Thank you SO much for this tip Kirsty. It will save me ages – not just on word breaks but also on things like formatting fonts and adding tables without going into html.
You are a star!
Michael
May 6th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Finally put this genius tip to good use
Thanks Kirsty!
MB