Michael K. Bergman of AI³ has just released a plugin that extends the default TinyMCE rich text editor in Wordpress 2.0+. This plugin will give you a full WYSIWYG editor for your Blog! Michael details his journey in putting together this plugin on his recent blog post, Extending TinyMCE, the WordPress Rich Text Editor.

In older versions of WordPress (1.5) the only text formatting available was by using QuickTags to format text. However, since Wordpress 2.0 was released the developers have now incorporated the proven Javascript Rich Text editor, TinyMCE as part of all new versions (2.0+). However, the rich text editor adopted by Wordpress is configured more like the previous QuickTags feature set and only has a few available editing functions such as bold, bullets, text alignment, etc. Here is a screenshot showing the default editor in your WordPress admin area;

Rich Text Editor For WordPress

Now, here is a screenshot showing the new WYSIWYG editor when the Extended TinyMCE plugin is installed and activated;

WYSIWYG Editor For Wordpress 2.0

As you can see, this new editor has a LOT more options and can be considered a full WYSIWYG editor for Wordpress. Here are just a few of the new features that are available;

  • Table creation
  • Cut/copy/paste
  • Headings, H1, H2 etc
  • Text Color & Highlighting
  • Clean Up HTML button & lots more.

This plugin is a great addition to your Wordpress installation and these extra features are sure to be useful. It is also easy to remove unwanted buttons by simply editing the advanced-wysiwyg.php plugin file using the Plugin Editor in your Wordpress installation.

To download this plugin visit Mike Bergman’s site here.