TinyMCE Entities Patch

Important Note: The recent release of WordPress 2.6 has fixed the disappearing entities bug this plugin was designed to fix, so once you upgrade to WordPress 2.6 please discontinue using this plugin. I may release a new plugin that prevents spaces from being stripped from the beginning of lines sometime in the near future.

After a few weeks of writing posts on WordPress, I was getting very irritated when all the HTML entities I added to my examples kept being converted into characters — e.g. HTML entities like &gt; &lt; &quot; would convert to > < " — when I saved the post I was working on.

To make matters worse, all the spaces I was using to align my coding examples would disappear when switching between “HTML” mode and “Visual” mode, even if I used the &nbsp; entity.

So, I finally bit the bullet and wrote this little plugin to fix these problems. It does just two things:

1. Allows you to enter HTML entities like &gt; &lt; &amp; etc. while in “Visual” mode and they will stay put, even after you save your post.
2. Allows you to type extra spaces while in “Visual” mode (or &nbsp; in “HTML” mode) and they will stay put too, allowing you to correctly indent code samples, etc.

If you are writing blog posts with source code or HTML examples, you may find this little plugin helps you avoid a ton of aggravation.

Works with TinyMCE and the TinyMCE Advanced plugin.

Please note, this plugin is a patch for issues with WordPress’s uses of TinyMCE, and not the editor itself.

If you try this plugin and like what you see, or you have questions or problems, feel free to email me at [email protected] or visit the TinyMCE Entities Patch Plugin Home Page with your feedback.

(Not tested on any version of WordPress older than 2.5.1. It may work on earlier versions, but I just don’t know for sure. Try it and see. If it doesn’t work simply deactivate the plugin. If it does work, please let me know!!)

Release Notes version 1.0

Changes in version 1.0

• This is the initial version of the plugin.