WordPress, How Tos, Plugins

Who would have thought….I’ve been grumping about the lack of buttons in TinyMCE, the “visual editor” or WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress, and come to find out, all this time there is so much more!

I went hunting for a plugin I’d seen that allowed custom buttons, and discovered that the standard installation of WordPress actually has a keyboard command that toggles some extra goodies off and on. Obviously, mine have all been off!

Turns out, you can Show/Hide the Advanced Editor Toolbar in the standard Wordpress installation and unlock a dozen or so extra buttons, including “Paste as Plain Text” and “Paste from Word”. When the Advanced Editor Toolbar is enabled, there is a toggle button available to turn it off. However, when it is off, you must use Alt-V (IE) or Shift-Alt-V (Firefox) to toggle the advanced buttons back “on”.

Adding Buttons is something I haven’t delved into yet. I need to play with this new toy first. But I learned from the Codex that under “Rich Editor Filters” in the Plugin_API/Hooks page, you can see a simple means of adding your own buttons to TinyMCE in WordPress.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference#Rich_Text_Editor_Filters

Advanced Editing Plugins

If the Advanced Editing Toolbar buttons are not sufficient, perhaps you’re looking for a plugin to extend the functionality of the TinyMCE editor, or to add custom code snippets. Here are two you can try:

Custom TinyMCE Buttons (for WordPress 2.1)

Advanced TinyMCE Editor (for Wordpress 2.2)

It was the former that I recalled having seen, which started me on this quest, and the latter which I discovered in the process, and informed me of the advanced toggle option. Surprised that I had never heard of it in two years of hanging out on the WordPress forums, I personally added the information to the Codex. I also added links to these two amazing plugins, which I’m sure will come in handy for others.

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