[wp-hackers] HTML in the visual editor

Fri Oct 28 15:53:23 UTC 2011

I don't think it's an issue of being naïve, you've managed to find a work around to an inherent problem in the system.  To say that embedding text (be it textual representations of code, or general words of speech) in the visual editor is "doing it wrong" because wordpress has a deficiency in handling it is all about perspective.  And coming from a different world (outside of the wordpress community) where it's possible to do and easier to do than relying on shortcodes as a fix, the idea of using shortcodes feels wrong to me... for that purpose anyway.

But my main gripe is that when I spend a bunch of effort to markup a post in HTML, it shouldn't be mangled and ripped apart just because I want to preview it in the Visual tab.  And that's what my plugin preserves, it keeps the formatting of your source code in the HTML tab consistent as you wrote it (for the most part) even if you switch tabs, or let others modify it on the visual tab.

In my industry we develop great looking sites for clients who then want to continue adding content.  Sometimes that requires classes on tags, sometimes it requires specific nesting of elements.  We could (and do) develop shortcodes in many cases to make it easier for them.  But our clients are capable people and they often look to the source code of other posts and pages we've written to figure out how to repeat the results elsewhere.  In that case, markup formatting is key to legibility.  With this plugin they can do both, without worrying about the Visual tab literally changing the content in some cases, let alone making the html markup one giant blob of text.

-----Original Message-----
From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com [mailto:wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Preston Fitzgerald
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2011 8:29 AM
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Subject: [wp-hackers] HTML in the visual editor

I don't have much love for the visual editor either, but I don't disable it.
If I find that I'm dumping a bunch of code into posts or pages I stop and realize I am doing it wrong.

Wordpress is all about the templates. Using templates and shortcodes to include html makes much more sense for the way I use the software. Maybe I'm being naïve?

Preston Fitzgerald

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Subject: wp-hackers Digest, Vol 81, Issue 46

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your wordpress life
      a little easier... (Rick Maltese)
   2. Re: Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your wordpress life
      a little easier... (Robert Lusby)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2011 01:35:01 -0400
From: Rick Maltese <okfrank at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your
	wordpress life a little easier...
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Message-ID:
	<CABrtOzjMkx-VLR+Z0OVmd1z8XFCPmuV8KgY4F2t_yVzm0cNjng at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Thanks for the effort.

Just tried to install and preserved-html-editor-markup won't activate.

Rick Maltese

>
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 10:45 PM, Marcus Pope
<Marcus.Pope at springbox.com>wrote:
>
>> In the past I have lightly managed and tweaked some wordpress 
>> installs and as a result I was put on a project at my current company 
>> Springbox that was a full site development. ?Through the course of 
>> that project and then two more I quickly realized two things:
>>
>>
>> 1. ? ? ? Wordpress is an amazing platform for rapid web development
>>
>> 2. ? ? ? The use of Absolute URLs, and how poorly the Visual / HTML
Editor
>> behaved made it a nightmare to work with as a professional platform.
>>
>> Blown away by the dozens of posts from Core WP developers that root 
>> relative urls are not possible, and after trying to do all of their 
>> suggestions to resolve my problem with none of them actually working 
>> I almost gave up on the platform entirely. ?And the ludicrous concept 
>> that in order to prevent your html markup from being corrupted by the 
>> visual tab you should just disable the visual tab altogether was 
>> almost the nail in the coffin.
>>
>> Alas, I don't shy away from a challenge and having over 15 years of 
>> experience with enterprise web development, and over 5 years of 
>> experience with developing my own WYSIWYG editors and extending 
>> others like tinyMCE, fckedit I realized these problems were not unsolvable.
>> So I've spent the last three weeks hacking away at the problem and 
>> here's what I have to offer
>> you:
>>
>> http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/preserved-html-editor-markup/
>>
>> http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/root-relative-urls/
>>
>> They are not perfect, and I will spend more time polishing them up.
>> They do work as advertised, as we have upgraded our past projects to 
>> work with them. ?And ultimately they seem to be the only solutions to 
>> top requests from the community for years, which kind of shocks me.
>>
>> Combined they actually make wordpress a dream to work with - sure it 
>> still has its quirks here and there, but the root-relative-urls 
>> plugin even accounts for links and media as they are embedded into 
>> the now usable wysiwyg/html editor.
>>
>> Check them out, let me know what you think. ?Ideally I'd re-architect 
>> the whole damn components in the WP core, but alas you know how that 
>> goes :D ?They were sort of sponsored by Springbox - the company I 
>> work for - in that I got to use my free time at work to create them, 
>> and I put in a few hours a week at night (like tonight) to finish them up.
>> We don't have a landing page on springbox.com yet, nor do we even 
>> have a support infrastructure for handling requests, but I'll do my 
>> best to keep up with the questions and the projects.
>>
>> Being a service-based agency, product development isn't a core 
>> strategy so I might be non-responsive at times when workloads are 
>> high
>> - clients first of course - but I'm now personally vested in this 
>> platform and would like to see it continue to excel.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Marcus Pope
>> Senior Software Developer
>> Springbox.com
>> _______________________________________________
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>> wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
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>>
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------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:33:25 +0100
From: Robert Lusby <nanogwp at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your
	wordpress life a little easier...
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Message-ID: <4EAA76E5.3050909 at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

On 28/10/2011 02:45, Marcus Pope wrote:
>
> Blown away by the dozens of posts from Core WP developers that root
relative urls are not possible, and after trying to do all of their suggestions to resolve my problem with none of them actually working I almost gave up on the platform entirely.  And the ludicrous concept that in order to prevent your html markup from being corrupted by the visual tab you should just disable the visual tab altogether was almost the nail in the coffin.

One day we all dream that the core team might finally see the light.

For WordPress to be a serious enterprise platform - it needs to make some serious enterprise changes.

Relative URL's would work for everyone - absolute URLs make things difficult for us enterprise lot (discounting that DB data should be kept clean - not containing URLs yardy da ... etc).

I have a dream. We can but hope.

Rob

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