Editing WordPress’s Visual Editor

These are the slides from a talk I gave at the 2011 WordCamps (WordPress conferences) in Chicago, Philly, and Orlando. I consider this a “sequel” to a broader talk on editing the WordPress administrative experience that I like to think I pioneered in 2010 at a few WordCamps, including Chicago and Mid-Alantic, which several new speakers now seem to be running with.

WordPress’s visual content editor (TinyMCE) is, in many ways, at the heart of WordPress’s content management experience. It’s where editors spend most of their time, and where content is crafted to appear on the front end of your site. Like most of WordPress, the editor can be customized to be both more powerful and more specific to the needs of an individual site or client. This presentation covers topics including custom editor stylesheets based on post type, modifying and removing buttons from the editor, and even creating your own custom buttons for the TinyMCE toolbar. It even covers brand new WordPress 3.3 techniques introduced with the new wp_editor function.

Intended for developers, it introduces new ideas and techniques to even the most experienced WordPress programmers, while also providing newer developers a good sense of how to use WordPress hooks in creative and powerful ways.

Look for an associated child theme that I’ll be posting here soon!

  1. thanks, This is good article!

  2. Very nice. I am the developer of a plugin called Ultimate Tinymce. Perhaps we can collaborate together? I am actively involved in my plugin development… and I absolutely agree with you the “out of the box” content editor needs some major improvements. This is where Ultimate Tinymce can help!

    Here is a link to the plugin in the WP repo:
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-tinymce/

    Good Luck… and hope to hear from you soon!

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