Like most people who recently tried the new wordpress 2.5, I had my share of problems using it’s new visual editor. A simple solution to the visual editor problem would be to turn it off completely but even someone as techno-savvy and HTML literate as myself still needs the visual editor on certain occasions. Besides the obvious wanted WYSIWYG advantage of faster formatting, I was simply irritated that one part of my WP installation was not working. Obviously this is a bug that the development team needs to take into account once a new subversion is released but in the mean time we have to find our own solution to the problem.
The problems I had with the editor was that it wasn’t displaying the style buttons in visual mode and it wouldn’t show the text box at all when you would switch to HTML mode. After searching through the wp support forums, I found this post which offered a number of solutions to the different visual editor problems the main solution being the Tiny MCE Advanced plugin by Andrew Ozz.
Here is a screen shot of my visual editor after installing the plugin.
A funny thing happened though when I deactivated the plugin. Instead of going back to it’s previous state where the editor would break when switching modes, it remained functional. The only differences were the loss of certain styling elements namely the font size, superscript, subscript, insert/edit attributes, print and smilies. Though these functions were lost the blockquote button were added (I think this is part of the “default” functions for wp) as well as the buttons for google videos and youtube videos which are part of the Viper’s Video quicktags.
edit//
Here is an ordered list of the things I did for those who need a simple how to.
- re-upload wp-admin and wp-includes (delete first then upload)
- Upload Tiny MCE
- Activate Tiny MCE (didn’t work)
- Deactivate Tiny MCE
- upload Tiny MCE advanced
- Activate Tiny MCE advanced
- clear browser cache
Thank you! Finally someone who has said what I need to hear in plain terms. I was beginning to think I would have to finish with wordpress. I will try the plugin, and if it doesn’t help, I’ll be back to see if you can help me.
Thanks again.
Hi Mark,
Thank you for all your emails! Thanks to you I have successfully got wordpress visual editor working. I am so glad I found your post. You should write down what you told me, as I am sure thousands of people will find you too, and want to know your answer!
Thanks again,
Susan
Mark! Found an easier way! My husband worked it out, while doing my other blogs. Used your way to begin with and then modified some steps. I wrote the steps on http://selectaffiliates.com
Thanks again for all your help. You are bookmarked!
IT WAS THE BEST OPTION TO FIX IT… THANX SO MUCH!!!