Saturday, May 12th, 2007...11:25 am

Undocumented Features In The Wordpress WYSIWYG Editor

I only just realised today that there are some undocumented features available in the Wordpress visual editor. Nothing too exciting but they do improve over the base functionality.

The added features include:

  • Text styles
  • Underline
  • Full paragaph alignment
  • Text coloring
  • Two varieties of paste (text and Word)
  • Formatting removal
  • Code cleanup
  • Custom character insertion
  • Undo/redo

You can open up these advanced features by using the following key commands.

  • Windows Firefox: Alt+Shift+V (Firefox)
  • Windows Internet Explorer: Alt+V (Internet Explorer)
  • Mac OS X Firefox: Ctrl+V

Make sure you have the visual editor enabled in your user profile otherwise pressing those keys won’t do anything.

I’ve only just moved back to the Wordpress visual editor after having endured a rather catastrophic incident with Windows Live Writer. It has somehow corrupted over 40 draft posts that I had saved. As you can imagine it has left me a little annoyed. I guess the lesson there is don’t trust Microsoft beta software.

Update:
Chris has made a plugin that adds an icon to your toolbar so you can access these features without having to muck about with hotkeys. You can download it here.

11 Comments

Filed under Wordpress

Tags: , , , ,

If you enjoyed this post subscribe to my RSS feed for free updates.

Related posts:

11 Comments

  • I saw this long back in my WYSIWYG Editor and then it suddenly disappeared…. I searched for it but all the screen shots did not show these hidden links…finally I found out where they are…. Thanks for the discovery :)

  • Old news :-)

    Your readers might like this simple little plugin that adds an editor button to show the the additional features (saves remembering short-cut keys)
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/visualize-advanced-features/

  • Alt+Shift+V (Firefox)

    Doesn’t work with FF 2.x. Instead, it brings up the “View” menu in the browser.

    This post still lead me to a very useful plug-in, so thanks! :-)

  • heh you mean you trust ANY microsoft software? I just use it and pray it doesn’t crash *grin*

  • James - Make sure the cursor is in the edit box. I’m using FF 2.0.0.3 and it does work.

    Vics - You always take a risk with MS software. I guess their beta stuff is more like Russian roulette.

  • I figured out the problem, I wasn’t using the WYSIWYG editor. When I switched to the WYSIWYG editor, the shortcut worked perfectly.

    Unfortunately, other editor plug-ins I use (multimedia-related) don’t work in WYSIWYG mode, but this is still quite useful for my clients.

    Thanks for the tip!

    James

  • I’d like to hear more about the corruption problem–what error did you see? Did you save the corrupted files?

    (We’ve never heard of data getting corrupted in Writer, and it would be especially surprising for two files to get corrupted at once, much less 40! If anything I would imagine it was the weblog configuration that got corrupted…?)

  • Joe these were drafts that were saved locally. This is the error I’m getting:

    Unexpected error occurred accessing local post (-2147287038)

    Storage file not found

    Can you point me to the directory that Live Writer stores saved drafts?

    Thanks.

  • My Documents\My Weblog Posts\Drafts. If you could zip and send a couple of those that are exhibiting the problem, that would really be great. Thanks…

  • Shortcut works great. Thanks for the info on the hidden features!

  • This is great! Why did they hide these items?!

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Blogarama - The Blog Directory Personal Blogs - Blog Top Sites Link With Us - Web Directory