Why are WordPress developers so DUMB? It’s something I’ve seen in other projects: the bigger the project the more disconnected from the real world the developers are. Why do they insist in adding the fucking auto formatting to WordPress posts? And if thy think there is a reason in doing so, why the hell don’t they include a fucking option to disable it. A fucking option to disable the shitty TinyMCE editor and the auto formatting all together? A tag to tell that stupid editor “don’t fucking touch this code bitch”?
WordPress removes br tags, adds p tags everywhere
Dumb developers at WordPress may think we all are so dumb as they are, and so we can’t manage our own post code. They think they are smarter than you and they know better when and where to place code. because we are soooo dumb.
I just tried to add a fucking form to one of my posts, a very basic form with three fields and two buttons and no matter what I did the fucking WordPress editor added code everywhere: it added unwanted br tags just before any text field and, funny, two br tags I manually typed because I wanted one of the fields in another row, were always removed. Thank you so much dumb WordPress developers for your much appreciated help! I’m too dumb to know what I’m doing.
Plug-ins to stop or disable WordPress auto formatting
Of course I’m not the only dumb blogger that is suffering from these smart guys (well, yes, they are dumb, but since I’m way dumber that them that makes them smarter than me). You can find hundreds of blog and forum posts asking how to remove this much loved auto formatting feature, and all our smart WordPress developers do is… nothing. Just nothing. After all, they are too smart compared to us and if auto formatting is there it may be for a reason. Don’t bother them with your irrelevant problems.
So many have tried to find a solution and it comes in the form of plug-ins. Whatever WordPress developers don’t want or don’t know how to fix, they will ask you to install a plug-in. I f the plug-in doesn’t exist, write it yourself or wait. The problem is, the plug-ins I hve tried so far don’t work. While I can format the form almost to my liking, I can’t still get the code untouched. Something is added anywhere. Always.
If you want to try for yourself maybe you are luckier than me and can get the desired effect, you have these options:
PS Disable Auto Formattin: “When editing it in the HTML mode, it stops unintended removal of br tag and p tag , either addition of p tag.”
Raw HTML: “In the end I decided to just go and write a plugin that would let me put any code or script (e.g. JavaScript) in my posts and display it to the visitor unmodified.”
Additionally you can just the code directly to your theme’s functinos.php file: Disable WordPress automatic formatting on posts using a shortcode.
Good luck with that. It worked… almost. WordPress still insisted in adding code no one aked for.
Disabling the visual editor won’t disable auto formatting
Turns out there is an option to disable the visual editor, and since you may think is this visual editor what is causing the formatting problems, you’d think that disabling it will solve the auto formatting problems. Well, not so. First, the option to disable the visual editor is hidden in your users profile options, as if they were ashamed of the monster they created. Why not add this option where it should be, in the Writing section under Settings? it is not something that will only affect some users… Then, if you finally disable it and you use the plain HTML post editor, some auto formatting will still be applied to your posts. How dumb can be that? You may be left trying to combine the HTML editor with one of the plug-ins just to see if you have more luck… I know I’ll try, and if I can come with a solution that really works, I’ll let you know (or you can point me to one solution in the comments if you know about one). Just to show you, with the visual editor disabled, I get this in my post, where 2 br tags have been added where only spaces should be, a p tag that is not closed has appeared (so much for stating that auto formatting is a way to force validating code in posts), the two br tags I placed to separate the last text and text field have disappeared, but one has then been added in a place that makes no sense:
<form id="form" style="text-align: center;"> <input name="weight" size="4" type="text" /> Peso (en kilos)<br /> <input name="height" size="4" type="text" /> Altura (en centímetros)<br /> <input onclick="calculateBMI()" name="button" type="button" value="Calcular" /> <input type="reset" value="Borrar" /> <p>Tu IMC aproximado:<br /> <input id="BodyMassIndex" name="BodyMassIndex" size="12" type="text" /></form>
Amazing. Nothing of this makes sense at all.
So all I can say for now is: fuck you WordPress developers. I appreciate all the work that is behind this blog software, but I really, really hate when you think you know better than me how to do things. It’s one of the reasons I left Windows many years ago, and one of the reasons why I may leave Firefox. It is not that you don’t know this problem exists, or that no one is asking you to solve it once and for all. You just think it is not worth your time. Well, them, fuck you. I’m really, really sick of this auto formatting shit. And you don’t care about it at all. Never did and never will.
<form id="form" style="text-align: center;"> <input name="weight" size="4" type="text" /> Peso (en kilos)<br /> <input name="height" size="4" type="text" /> Altura (en centímetros)<br /> <input onclick="calculateBMI()" name="button" type="button" value="Calcular" /> <input type="reset" value="Borrar" /> <p>Tu IMC aproximado:<br /> <input id="BodyMassIndex" name="BodyMassIndex" size="12" type="text" /></form>
Pingback: Upgrading WordPress will upgrade the default theme… why? | Antonio Rojilla
just add this to function.php in your theme.
remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'wptexturize');
you get a free thing and you are complaining like a bitch just because you found a little problem with this. just don’t use wp you moron!!
So you think people should say nothing about things that drive them mad? Just because they are free? It’s because people bitch about annoying things that those things get fixed. The Z gave a solution that I really thank.
I use WordPress for serious web development, it’s a great CMS solution for small businesses. And I have to say, the auto-formatting logic is really, really not a good thing at all. It is impossible to turn off, and ends up causing all kinds of problems with the presentation of content. With a CMS, the idea is that my clients can manage their own content without knowing code. But because of this silly autoformatting nonsense, they are always calling me to clean up their posts. And since I gave them the solution, I can’t very will BILL for the time: it is seen by them as necessary support for a product which, effectively, doesn’t do what they paid for. Not good. WP: let us disable this crazy feature. It makes no sense how you implemented it.
Antonio I think that the rant has some merit. Especially it you are looking to utilize some of the added functionality that WordPress is supposed to offer such as shortcodes, you should not have to constantly battle this erroneous code being added to the pages of many of our custom blog design projects.
Overall the default WordPress user does need these spacing additions to easily and efficiently jump in and crate posts without having to worry about coding but certainly some better recognition of shortcode sections and such would be a welcome addition should WordPress be looking to improve upon the core of its advanced users.
Thanks for those tools to disable auto-formating.
Really gotta agree with the OP. WP formatting is a complete nightmare!
Even worse is if you try and import something from office 2007 to WP, tags everywhere!
But I can’t disable the auto formatting because other people are using the same account and have no problem with it (of course they also claim there isn’t a problem with office 2007 so maybe Im just overly sensative?).
Anyway, I’ve had some success (Still takes me far to long to clean up afterwards though) placing the pictures in first and then pasting stuff in (from a txt file).
The other thing is that WP will delete formatting in the order you change it. What I mean by that is you need to make ALL your changes before saving or switching to design view. If you come back to change one thing it’ll delete all the formating again…
What I really don’t get about the whole sittuation is that this is the industry format blog, but barely anyone ever mentions this as a problem!
I actually think It would actually be easier to work from scratch (And thats including teaching the rest of the office how to use some simple HTML!).
(If you haven’t guessed I’m not a fan of all the proprietry formatting companies think we need).
The auto-formatting is definitely a nightmare. Anytime you switch between code and the visual editor, God only knows what’s going to happen. It turns a completely simple task into three times the amount of work it should be.
I couldn’t just switch off the visual editor, because the whole point of utilizing WordPress was to allow my client to do her own edits, and she doesn’t know the first thing about code.
I’ve since installed the PS Disable Auto Formatting plugin, and it seems to be behaving much better, including switching between the two. I’ve created a test page and edited it several times and I didn’t encounter any bizarro random tags or mysteriously erased line breaks.
Nevermind…WP still manages to screw it up.
LoL , I was expecting your second reply when I read your first one.
I’m new to WP. After hearing for more than a year about how great WP is – how flexible and user friendly it is – I finally made the leap and decided to change my website from php update to WP.
What a nightmare. I’ve spent every waking hour combing the net trying to solve one problem after another. Unbelievable what a patchwork rat’s nest WP actually is.
My latest frustration is with the WP editor. What a monumental piece of junk. I cannot believe that a platform called “WORD”press has such a sickly little editor. After all, isn’t WordPress supposed to be for posting TEXT to the internet?
After installing TinyMCE Advanced, I was pleased to have some of the most basic buttons added to the editor but completely crushed when I discovered that there’s still no “Normal” setting under the Format tab.
Every time I add text, the editor throws in lines in between text and I can’t remove them AND, since the stupid editor filters all the line breaks from the HTML, I can’t even fix it up on the HTML side. What’s the point of having an HTML Text editor if it filters out the line breaks? I mean good God, this is TEXT we’re talking about. Are line breaks kind of crucial to allowing a writer to express his/her creativity on the page?
WP does suck and now I’m stuck in this labyrinth for the long haul. People bitch about having to pay for software and how Microsoft is out to rule the world and all that nonsense but, people, look at WordPress – this is what you get for free. This is what open source is all about – an unregulated animal farm with no keeper, a patchwork quilt of duck tape workarounds.
Sad and infinitely frustrating.
I had the same problem and I came here for a solution. The next page I came across mentioned that Tiny MCE Advanced which I already had installed has a setting to allow those to remain. I just hadn’t check it off in the settings. I agree that they really should fix the issue. Let us decide how we want to format our page.
I have been using Joomla for about a year now and recently added a WordPress blog. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought the WordPress editor was great. But, having experience with Joomla, another free CMS, WordPress’s editor is really awful. It’s not really a true WYSWYG editor because what I write is not how it ends up looking. It keeps flipping back and forth between visual and HTML and placing erroneous tags everywhere. If I could figure out how to plug in the JCE editor from Joomla into WordPress, I would be a happy camper.
The remove_filter code doesn’t work for me. I have tried it a few times in desperation. I also tried something more complicated to a similar effect, also had no effect. I hate this so much.
I have some custom buttons that get completely stuffed up by this so called smart code. I agree it doesn’t make sense what it does to my code. It adds mess all over the place. It adds a tag and then closes it with nothing in it. What’s with that. I mean I have a return and they add three and some code that isn’t applied to anything. I also have a couple of pages with a table in it to get some specific layout happening, but WP engine duplicates some of the text so I end up with a partial copy of some of the table content. No chance you can ever blame that on me or give me a reasonable explanation for it. It doesn’t work. Simple as that it’s faulty.
Additionally any advantage I may gain from turning off the visual editor is negated by the inability to do a quick format check. To add to this my authorised posters have to turn their editors off and hope they don’t turn it back on. If they do and edit one of my pages they will completely kill the buttons and extra code.
I agree, I really hate this issue because it creates so many problems for me, like I do a lot of iframe video embedding, well apparently with the most recent 3.2.2 update the problem is back and its better than ever, now if you try to add a video or you edit a post where an iframe of a video that already exists, is in the content, it is wiped out, just plain text now, so no html at all, I have tried four different types of editors, and different types of plugins, but nothing works, I sort of have to say you know I agree, but I want a solution, there has to be one, out there somewhere.