I love WordPress. I think it is one of the best content management systems around (even though I am open to the idea of using others). But there are some ridiculous issues with the visual editor that need to be addressed, not ignored, by the development team.
The issue I’m talking about today is a horizontal rule bug/issue. If you insert a horizontal rule,
, into a WordPress post, it will destroy the formatting of the following paragraph (or entire post) if you use the visual editor at any point in the future for that post.
Let’s say I’m creating a post and decide to manually go into the HTML editor to add in a horizontal rule (which I do frequently on my posts):
The results are as follows:
Perfect!
Now, how what about when I want to continue editing my post (I primarily use the visual editor for all my work):
Looking good so far, but wait:
Hmmmm, well, that looks like an issue. You might not notice the subtle difference in line height at first, but just take a closer look at the second paragraph when compared to the result of the HTML editor.
WordPress has now replaced what I believe should have been a paragraph tag, which should be surrounding the whole paragraph, with no formatting whatsoever.
When you use the visual or html editor, you should notice that you are not required to type in paragraph,
, tags, but they are placed there automatically. So, I believe that WordPress forgets to insert those paragraph tags after following a horizontal rule.
Instead, WordPress thinks that the text following the horizontal rule is somehow attatched to the horizontal line as follows (note that I inserted the paragraph tags only for emphasis of what the true output is):
Leo Laporte regularly produces netcasts on his TWiT network and streams live video on his TWiT Live network. Mr. Laporte also has a talk radio show called The Tech Guy. He was formally a television personality for TechTV.
I am writing a whole bunch of content to simply point out the fact that a horizontal rule will screw up the formatting after I attempt to use the visual editor. Of course, many people say not to use the visual editor, but I say if they are going to include a visual editor, they need to make it work.
The rest of the content of this article
That is completely wrong.
It should format as follows:
Leo Laporte regularly produces netcasts on his TWiT network and streams live video on his TWiT Live network. Mr. Laporte also has a talk radio show called The Tech Guy. He was formally a television personality for TechTV.
I am writing a whole bunch of content to simply point out the fact that a horizontal rule will screw up the formatting after I attempt to use the visual editor. Of course, many people say not to use the visual editor, but I say if they are going to include a visual editor, they need to make it work.
The rest of the content of this article.
It just doesn’t make any sense, and it is even more disappointing to know that WordPress has still not fixed this issue.
So, I’m calling them out on this. WordPress, please fix this issue already. For someone that likes to use the visual editor, this just drives me insane. Personally, I would appreciate, but I also think that many others would appreciate the same quality with the visual editor. I’d also like to point out that I had no such problems with MovableType or Drupal.
So, if you believe that this issue should be fixed, feel free to Stumble or Digg this article so that the WordPress development team will take notice. Also, please let everyone know of any other quirks you have found with the visual editor in the comments section below. I’d love to know about them.
10 thoughts on “WordPress Development Team: Fix the Horizontal Rule Issue Already!”
I agree, big time mess with the editor. I was hoping to see some improvements in 2.7…..but no such luck. The tables in tinymce are coded crappy making them difficult to use without unwanted results…..and forget about adding multiple images from left, center and right, everything just gets jumbled together, even after using a text editor and cleaning up the code. Wish it weren’t so 🙁
WordPress editor is total mess, I guess devs focus on the
look and feel – cool, modern, web 2.0 – thats the shit!
Problems with HR, ongoing problem with img captions, probs
with adding emty lines, wp stris out the code you manually
add within html editor, etc. The deeper i go into wp the more
disappointed I am. Nobody cares about the basic stuff :/
The visual editor has been alright for me, but there are many issues.
For example, when you hit the delete key on an empty paragraph, many times the carrot (text cursor) will return to the very top of the editor.
It can be very frustrating at times.
I’d be delighted if I could get to the point of complaining about the horizontal rule. The whole Visual Editor is stubbornly broken and entirely missing in 2.5 and now in 2.6. I’ve tried a dozen fixes posted here and there and nothing works. This issue is all over the WordPress forums.
I have two other WordPress installations that I don’t dare upgrade past 2.3 because if the Visual Editor went missing, well, I’d have to listen to the actual editors lose their minds.
TinyMCE works fine in Drupal. No issues whatsoever.
Trust me, I always do my research before writing anything. 😀
Well, I know that the TinyMCE editor is maintained and updated outside of WordPress but the WordPress Dev team does in fact update the TinyMCE core when a new version is released. The question I have is this, Is this the fault of WordPress, or the fault of the guys who create and maintain TinyMCE? Let’s blame the right people
Nope, it isn’t just you. A ton of people have had this problem over the years. I’m included. It is like the WordPress dev team just ignores it for one reason or another.
It needs to be fixed already.
If I knew how to program well, I would have already fixed it, but I don’t know how to fix it, unfortunately.
That is a silly thing to say. If I knew how to fix such a thing, I actually would do it myself.
However, this has been a problem for well over two years. It needs to be fixed. So, yes, I will call out the WordPress developers. They need to know that people want this issue fixed.
How are you “calling out” a free open source project? If you want it fixed, fix it and submit the code for inclusion in the next update!
I’ve been wondering if it was just me! The terrible editor in WordPress has given me so much grief. I now use Windows Live Writer instead, which I really like, but still have problems anytime I have to open an article in WordPress (like to change the time for publication). I’m with you on calling for changes: please fix the editor!
Homemaker Barbi
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