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.

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.

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).

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.