coffee2code.com

I came across a few formatting bugs in the course of creating the entry related to my first plugin. When I used Movable Type, I opted to not have MT do any formatting of my posts for me. While giving me complete control over the look and layout, it was a bit tedious to wrap each paragraph in <p> and </p>, using <br /> to denote end-lines and blank lines, etc. In using WordPress, I’ve allowed it to do some of the formatting, and I checked “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically.”

Such handling comes with a price. Here are a few samples which will trigger WordPress formatting bugs. The bugs involve at least the function balanceTags() in wp-includes/functions-formatting.php, and possibly others. At this point in time I haven’t gotten deep enough into this aspect of the WordPress code so I don’t have a solution to these particular problems, but I’ll document them in case someone else can fix them. (I’m not the first to encounter the worst of the items listed below, as evidenced by this bug tracker item.)

Gah. I just spent a considerable amount of time doing the layout and formatting for the first plugin post, and I discovered a few frustrating aspects of WordPress’s formatting:

1. When saving/publishing an entry that is in need of a closing tag, WordPress seeks to close it for you. Appreciated behavior, when it works properly. I’ve found that if a close tag is not present and WP inserts it for you, it is sometimes either (a) in the wrong spot (i.e. closes a mid-list <li> at the end of the <ol>/<ul> -or- (b) worse, it eats up some of the entry text in doing whatever it was doing. There is already a bug tracker item on this.
2. If I had continued that lowercase sublist and put in a ( c) [without the space before the ‘c’, I would’ve wound up with a ©, which I wouldn’t have wanted. This is a result of wptexturize() (see next item)
3. I was having a hell of a time figuring out why I was getting curly quotes for all single- and double-quote characters. Checking out the source of the page in my browser, I saw that single-quote characters were replaced with either &#8216; or &#8217;, and double-quote characters were replaced with &#8220; or &#8221;. This was when I discovered that wptexturize(), in /wp-includes/functions-formatting.php, was the culprit. As a result, I wrote a mini-plugin, wpuntexturize (the plugin is being pre-linked since I haven’t created the page for it yet as of this posting). The mini-plugin goes back and reverts some of wptexturize’s changes to what I had used originally. I could just as easily have commented out those four lines in the function and be done with it, as well as spared the processing of the replace and unreplace, but I’m currently of the mindset to limit modifications to the core files as much as possible.