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WordPress and WYMeditor


This post was published on Tuesday 1 January 2008.

EDIT 22/04/08:
If you use the latest versions of WordPress, Admin SSL and Simple WYMeditor, then this workaround is no longer necessary.

I currently use WordPress to publish my blog, and I recently discovered that there is a plugin () that lets you use my favourite online text editor - WYMeditor - to write blog posts.

So far so good - but I encountered a problem.   I enabled the plugin in WordPress but nothing happened.   Then I discovered that another plugin I use - Admin-SSL, which unsurprisingly secures the WordPress admin pages - was not securing pages from the /wp-content/ directory, which is where the plugins are.   The page was trying to call the WYMeditor plugin script using an unsecured link, which was causing it to break.

So I added the following code to admin-ssl.php at line 370:

370	$content_url = get_option(”siteurl”) . “/wp-content”;
371	$secure_content_url = $secure_url . “/wp-content”;
372	$replace_this[] = $content_url;
373	$with_this[] = $secure_content_url;

This fixed the first problem.

However I noticed that the autosave function was not working either.   Apparently some people find it annoying, but I find it extremely useful while I’m writing blog posts.   After spending ages looking through the code of the WYMeditor plugin, through the WYMeditor documentation, and the autosave() function in WordPress, I found a way to fix it.

There is an HTML textarea element called ‘content’ which WYMeditor replaces, and which WordPress uses to get what you are writing.   When you click the ‘Save’ button, WYMeditor updates that textarea element with whatever you’ve written, and WordPress saves it.

However, the WYMeditor plugin only updates the textarea element when you click the save button, so the autosave() function doesn’t work - when it looks at the ‘content’ textarea element, it’s empty.   What we need to do, then, is automatically update the textarea element when the autosave() function is called.   Thankfully, WYMeditor has an inbuilt function to do this, called update().

Two things need to be done.   First, open simple-wymeditor.php, which is the main file for the WYMeditor plugin (it’s probably in /wp-content/plugins/simple-wymeditor/).   Comment out lines 143 and 168, to look like this:

143	//jQuery( function() {
...
168	//});

This allows us to access the WYMeditor functions through jQuery.   Save the file and close it.   Now open the WordPress autosave.js file (in /wp-includes/js/).   At line 98 insert the following:

98	if(wym = jQuery.wymeditors(0)) wym.update();

This updates the ‘content’ textarea element if it can find a WYMeditor object, so the code won’t break if you disable the WYMeditor plugin.

So there you have it - my WordPress now works with the WYMeditor plugin, and I’m very happy, and very tired after a couple of hours reading other people’s code!