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Friday, August 1, 2008

How to get the enhanced Rich text editing buttons in wordpress.com editor?

The why -- Bloggers need Rich text editing..


If you are a newbie wordpress.com blogger, chances are that at some point you would have pulled your hair out trying to figure out how the heck to display the rich text editing buttons that would give you the MS word like editing features. I definitely remember doing that, it was an uphill experience. Believe me, I had "seriously" tried to look for it in Google and wordpress forums -- only to be told that you are probably mistaking wordpress.com for wordpress.org (arrgh!) and that its not part of the free wordpress.com blog (that was support talking -- can you believe that?).

I am posting this in the hope that a fellow newbie like me would not be in the same boat and gets productive right off the bat.

This is what you might originally see when you write a new post..




Life was difficult with this kind of editor. To put heading tags, I had to use the HTML editor and put these tags in manually, which was a royal pain:


Then one fine day...


It was Serendipity. Nothing less. While editing a post, I hit a key by mistake, and Viola!, there it was, the rich text palette, right in front of it. I had really no idea what had caused the second half of rich text editing buttons to come up, but I could see that it was not disappearing even after many shutdown and startups of my laptop.

Strangely, it would not come up on my other computers even though I was logged into the same wordpress account.

Its the kitchen sink, silly..


Serendipity - Part 2. God has his ways of revealing his glories. This fine day, I accidently clicked on the color palette icon on the extreme right end in the hope of getting some colors, but instead, I got the rich text editing buttons in the editor! The so called color palette was called the Kitchen sink. Duh! How ignorant of me. Thank you Almighty, for delivering me from ignorance.

So this is how it looked now:


Life was beautiful now...


I could do different kind of formatting, underlining, paste from word, erase, indenting, undo, redo, heading, color change etc.



Hope you find this useful too. Do leave me a message if you do.

1 comment:

  1. you rock. I think you wrote this post just for me! I too stumbled on the kitchen sink button (what a dumb name by the way) and was having problems with line spacing, things indenting I didn't want to, and other silly quirks...but I'm still a newbie so my website does not reflect all this newfound knowledge...have to go back and correct all the mess! BUt thanks so much for the artiel, it did help! Mission accomplished.

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