tinymce

Add Buttons To Visual Editor

Adding Custom Icons

Using the visual editor in WordPress when writing a blog post is great. However, don’t you sometimes wish that you could add custom buttons to the editor to perform specific functions that are either lacking or hard to navigate to? There is great news in that, you can add custom buttons to your visual text editor by editing the quicktags.js file. (back this file up before you actually edit anything).

WPCandy has an awesome tutorial online which takes you through the motions of creating and then adding your own custom button to the text editor. For instance, when I want to use the H2 tag, I have to click on the button which brings down the advanced options and then select H2 Heading from the drop down box. Using this tutorial, I have created a button specifically for H2 so I no longer need to browse through the advanced buttons area.

The tutorial is not at all difficult so give it a try. Let me know what sort of options you end up adding to your existing toolbar.

WordPress 2.3 Released Codenamed Dexter

Wordpress.org LogoWordPress 2.3 has finally been released to the public. This is a major release and users of WordPress are encouraged to update as soon as possible. Before you do anything, make sure you create a full backup in case things go bad. I’ll be updating this blog throughout the night and hopefully, I’ll still be around when you wake up. If not, you know what happened to this site.

Time to review the change log to find out why we should upgrade.

  • Native Tagging Support: You can now user tags in addition to categories. 2.3 includes a set of tag importers for tag plugins that existed prior to 2.3 These importers include Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins. Matt states that the new tagging system is pretty fast which should please a number of webhosting companies.
  • Update Notifications: WordPress 2.3 introduces a way for users to be notified when a new release of WordPress is available or when an update to a plugin has been released. This feature works by sending your sites URL, plugins, and version information to the wordpress API.ORG service which compares the information to their internal database.
  • Canonical URLs: Canonical URLs enforce no www-preferences, redirect posts with changed slugs, redirect URLS that get cut off in emails similar to the correct post. According to WordPress these new URLs should help users as well as providing more SEO options.
  • Pending Previews: Those who use multi-user blogs or WordPressMU will appreciate this feature. Authors can submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before, they would have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
  • Advanced WYSIWYG: WordPress has somehow manage to stuff more features into the Visual Text editor. This update now shows off more features that in TinyMCE that were previously hidden. Dave, looks like your secret is no longer a secret.

In addition to these new features, developers will have a host of new things to deal with such as Atom 1.0 support, jQuery, a new taxonomy system, new importers, hooks and filters and much more. The WordPress community has also helped contribute to over 351 trouble tickets that were closed in the Trac.

You can view the Codex for more information about the release and some screenshots. And of course the place to download is always the same. Before you upgrade you may want to check out our Preparing for 2.3 post.

Matt is hosting an upgrade party within the San Francisco area but I figured I would host one of my own on Skype. If you are awake and care to upgrade your WordPress installation along with me and a few other people, be sure to add me jeffr0e to your Skype contact list and let’s get this party started.

Texty Rolls Out Anticipated Updates

Texty.com LogoThe easy content creation service known as Texty which I reviewed here, Simple Content Creation Using Texty, has rolled out some anticipated updates. One of those updates fixed the Google SEO problem so many users mentioned.

In each Texty edit object under “Advanced Secret Options” you can now input the URL where you plan to post your Texty. Texty claims their indexing techniques will ensure your content will be crawled by search engine spiders which was a missing feature that turned quite a few newcomers away from using the service. They have also added a privacy feature in case you wouldn’t want your content to be indexed. Before you publish your Texty Note, click the “Private” button.

New Texty Features

One of the other updates that were featured in this release is the ability to add a DIGG function to anyone of your Texty notes. This control can be found within the Advanced Options tab. I’m not sure if you’ll ever see a Texty reach the front page of DIGG but hey, it’s worth a shot.

Simple Content Creation Using Texty

Texty.com Logo

For webmasters who do not have the luxury of using a WYSIWYG text editor to publish posts, Texty as mentioned on Techcrunch comes in real handy providing a way for anyone to use a rich text editor to create dynamic content.

Synopses:

One of the best features found within most dynamic content management systems is the text editor used to write articles. These text editors give users an abundant amount of options while providing an ease of use factor, allowing virtually anyone to style, format and configure articles without having to know HTML. With that being said, there are still a ton of static websites that are being used today which require users to edit the page within a text editor of their choice such as Dreamweaver or CoffeeCup, require HTML knowledge to create, and last but not least, an FTP connection for uploading those pages to your site. Texty aims to eliminate most of these mundane processes. Continue reading →