Yesterday I posted a blog entry of a flashlight review I wrote at BudgetLightForum. BLF has an editing tool that is like a little word processor with toolbar buttons, but you can also view the HTML it is creating and edit that if you really need to. It uses some unnecessarily complicated HTML tags (SPAN tags, particularly), so when I bring everything over, I edit the HTML by doing a bunch of find and replace commands to get rid of the funky tags. When I am done, the HTML is pretty clean and then I can cut and paste the HTML into WordPress using its HTML editing instead of its Visual editing mode.
One thing I really don’t like about that whole WordPress Visual/HTML editing thing is if you have certain tags that you put into a blog entry, they will be eliminated if you go to Visual mode. Because WordPress remembers the last editing mode you were in, sometimes if you go to edit an entry, it will default to Visual mode and the tags will disappear.
Anyway, that has nothing to do with anything, but I don’t have much to say here other than the subject.
The entry I brought over looked fine. But I went back to an older review I had brought over and I think at some point I must have gotten into Visual mode because the mouseover images were no longer working. I also noticed that there was a big blank white space before each table and my bullet lists were double spaced. I think it saves all the hard returns I had within the table code and puts them before the table. Take the hard returns out and the big white space goes away, but the code is horrible to edit.
But I went to my new entry and there were hard returns in the tables with no white space. And the bullet lists looked fine too. I tried a lot of things before, noticing the only difference was the new entry used tags written with lower case letters and the old one used upper case letters, I changed all the tags to lower case. Bam! Everything looked great.
It turns out that WordPress really is using XHTML and upper case tags are not legal when using XHTML, I mean, xhtml. So annoying. Back in the old, old days of the internet, all tags were supposed to be upper case. Now upper case isn’t even allowed. But I’m glad that I can put hard returns in the HTML which will make it easier to edit.
I have a similar problem in Joomla, which also has an editor/code view, but the code view is not pure, so things can get reformatted. Joomla also allows multiple editor plug-ins. One editor may handle tables better. Another may handle photos. So I have about 3 different editors.
Well, I have some more complicated articles I regularly update where it is easier to use straight HTML. So I picked up an editor toggle plug-in that allows for quick editor switching, and it has a “no editor” setting. When I open the HTML articles, I switch to No Editor and never risk stripping stuff out.
Perhaps WordPress has a plug-in or two for more pure coding?