There have been lots of complaints about WordPress’ visual editor. It adds extra (usually unwanted) formatting whenever you have a line break. It’s just a pain to deal with. Understandably, I personally never use it. For those who may not be knowledgeable at HTML, there are excellent alternatives available. In this guide I’ll go over:
- TinyMCE Advanced
- Dean’s FCKEditor
- How to disable the visual editor
If you’re fed up with the default WordPress visual editor, I suggest you read on.
Make sure before reading on you know how to install a WordPress plugin. Installing with OneClick will also work with both of these plugins.
TinyMCE Advanced
TinyMCE Advanced is a plugin which will add on to the current functionality of the WordPress visual editor. You’ll be able to add and remove items from the write menu. You can get the plugin here.
You’ll be able to add items such as font size and face, tables, smilies, among other things. It can also disable the automatic adding of paragraph and line break tags.
Dean’s FCKEditor
Now, if you want something completely different than the WordPress default editor. Try FCKEditor for WordPress. What this does is replace WordPress’ default editor with FCKEditor, a powerful editing software - similar to MS Word, except for the web.
The picture explains it all, complete transformation of the editor. Convinced yet? Download the plugin here.
Disabling the Visual Editor
If you’re comfortable with HTML code, and would rather just get rid of the visual editor altogether - there’s a quick way to do this. In your WordPress admin panel, simply navigate to Users -> Your Profile.
Uncheck the box that says: Use the visual editor when writing. And that’s that, no more visual editor. You’ll be stuck with the code editor from now on - unless you check off that box again.
Conclusion
Hope you found some good alternatives to the WordPress visual editor after reading this post. Thankfully with WordPress, if there’s functionality you don’t like, there’s usually a plugin to fix it.
If you liked this article feel free to comment and share. Subscribe to the feed for the latest Theme Lab updates.
Wow, how easy is that?
Thanks Leland
My favourite editor has to be the TinyMCE Advanced plugin, which I now have on my website.
As I said before, thanks Leland!
THXs fot the tip, I was looking for something like that, really good stuff…
And why bother to?
I too switched to Tiny MCE Advanced. I had issues with an earlier version of it, but it works so great now, I can’t live without it.
I feel it’s better than Dean’s FCKEditor because I can still switch to code mode when I want/need. Can’t do that with FCKEditor.
Good post. I think this would definitely be helpful for people looking for more functionality, or less, from the WordPress post editor.
What I’d be interested in seeing is some kind of stats on how people use the WordPress editor. I remember turning it off about a week after I started using WordPress three years ago. I’m not even sure how much more advanced it has become. What percentage of WordPress users do you think use the visual editor versus the HTML editor?