Karthik Nataraaj

Rich text editor problem in wordpress

After started using the wordpress blog, the feature I really missed was the rich text editor(an advanced text box with toolbars to format the text) used to create a new blog post. I was surprised to see just a basic text box available in the post page and no option was available for the rich textbox. Only later I came to know that there was an advanced rich text editor option hidden in its control panel.

I googled a bit to know how to activate that feature and found that using the shortcut keys (Alt + Shift + V) would do the trick if pressed when creating a new post. But I tried to do that and nothing seemed to change in the post page; only my browser’s “View menu” got activated whenever I pressed those keys.

I again googled about this problem for more than an hours, then created a support ticket in the wordpress support forum on this issue and tried every possible thing to get the rich text editor activated. Nothing went my way and only the next day I discovered that a javascript error message was being logged in the background whenever the shortcut (Alt + Shift + V) is pressed in the keyboard. The error was “tinymce not defined” which is an error related to the tinymce text editor plugin used in the wordpress blog software by default.

When I dug my hands into the support forum of wordpress to get some details about the error message, I found out that I was not the only one having the rich text editor problem and lot of people out there have the same issue. Even the moderators of the support forum found it difficult to give us a good workaround and they told me that this is a php related issue in some specific hosting servers.

So waiting till the next version 2.1.3 of wordpress is the only option for this problem and I was forced to find an alternative text editor plugin to use in my blog until the next version releases. Because I don’t have the time and patience to do the formatting html stuff manually for each post.

After all the hassles, thankfully I found a powerful, easily installable and free rich text editor plugin FCKEditor suggested in a blog for wordpress. I uploaded the plugin, activated it and it works like a charm.

I almost spent 4 to 5 hours to get around the issue, but it takes just a couple of minutes to get the alternative plugin to work. If you have the same problem as I had in your blog, better you go for the alternative editor option straight away rather than wasting your precious time to search for a fix. I’d recommend you to install the FCKEditor plugin which worked for me as expected.

Add comment March 21st, 2007