Wordpress – Plugins for easy blog writing/editing
When I started blogging, the number one thing that bothered me was writing the whole text in a text area in the browser.
What a _PAIN_IN_THE_ASS_. I am devout Vi (Vim) fan (even been called an addict). I move inside Vi only like Beethoven inside the Fifth Symphony. [Sorry Beethoven, I will never ever put you and me in the same sentence again]. So writing long pieces just makes it even more harder – especially if I am writing my own html. No matter what you write, sometimes wordpress would automatically try to escape all new lines and create its own new lines.
After some searching around, found two plugins.
1. Disable wptexturize : This is a plugin to make wordpress not escape certain elements. But this did not fully suit my need.
2. WP Unformatted : Now this did *exactly* what it promised to do. Remove all formatting. So now I can type all I want in Vim, style it in anyway, mix html when needed and then just copy the whole thing to the text area box and voila! it all just works.
More details about this plug in is here.
The only small thing (inconvenience) is that you have to add a var called “sponge” and set it to 1. But then again, one can edit the source file and always set it to 1 – so not really a big deal. Thanks to Alex King for such a cool and extremely useful plug in.
In my humble opinion, this plugin (which is only a few lines) should be part of the main wordpress install and there should be one of those tiny icons (like bold, italic, image, link…) which says “no format”.