I’ve never really had any cause to write large posts using WordPress, except for my NSLU2 guides – and even then the built-in WYSIWYG editor was good enough, albeit a little clunky and requiring gentle persuasion every so often.

But after changing blog themes the other day, I realised the NSLU2 pages were actually quite dependent on the underlying CSS – and for some themes, this means that they looked rubbish.

So I went about reformatting the pages. There are only half a dozen of them, and only one or two are of any considerable size – but this was enough to find exactly how annoying the WordPress WYSIWYG editor can be. I ended up with inconsistent newlines (although the HTML was consistent), weird closing tags that didn’t match anything else in the document, and random behaviour whereby the editor would say something along the lines of “hey, I can’t figure out exactly what you’re trying to do, so why don’t I double-space half of this here single-spaced text, indent the whole document from this point onwards, and completely unformat all your headings?”

There’s a little feature on the WordPress.org website called Kvetch!, which allows users to anonymously vent their annoyance at WordPress’s quirks and bugs. I had seen that several people don’t like the built-in HTML editor that WordPress has, but I myself had only ever needed to write a few paragraphs and make a couple of words bold, nothing more – and for this it is fine adequate.

But for decent formatting capabilities, the built-in editor just doesn’t cut it. It is what I have decided to call a WYSINWYWBYWJHTGWI editor. Yes, a What-You-See-Is-Not-What-You-Want-But-You-Will-Just-Have-To-Go-With-It editor. I’m going to register that as a trademark so that the WordPress people can’t thieve it from me when they release their next iteration.

So, there was else nothing for it. I cracked open Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, and used that as my editor to reformat everything. I didn’t use the WYSIWYG designer, I just wanted something that would give me syntax colouring.

I was fully prepared to go so far as to use notepad – but I think that would have been a little too hardcore for my liking.