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Update and Bump to top:

I have found some behavior that I didn’t expect to find with the TinyMCE editor. Occasionally it doesn’t allow you to cut and paste from the visual editor using Firefox and the Firefox spell checker does not allow for a right context mouse click to fix the word. This is not consistent but happens enough to worry some people.

I think this happens because of a TinyMCE advanced plugin that somehow mucks with firefox. The solution in both cases is to hold down the CTRL key in Windows XP while trying the action.

Also, The developer of the Image Manager Plugin has retrofitted it to fix the 2.5 compatibility issue. It should be ready by end of week. This is great news as the plugin is excellent.

Original Article below:

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Whoa, no sooner did I upgrade to the latest WordPress 2.5 release that I decided to sit down and change that sickly powder blue interface to something more palatable along a brown/gray theme. Being rather stubborn I did this the hard way by changing the default css for the “fresh” color scheme and adding some color to the 4 “ADD MEDIA” button gif’s that appear at the top of the write post editor. I would have written this as a plug-in but it really is a simple CSS change and swap of the buttons. That and I just don’t have the time for a plugin at the moment. For those interested you can download my CSS changes here. Please back up your originals, I can provide them but they are version specific so you are better off backing your own up. It must be untarred at the root of the wordpress installation. My CSS works in any browser if you simply want to ditch that powder blue look and feel. Keep in mind that this is a change to the base CSS that is installed with wordpress, and not an official anything so don’t install my css if you don’t know what you are doing.

In addition or in preference to the changes that I made in the default admin console you can grab a beautiful replacement admin console called Fluency Admin. This console/skin is simply excellent and a huge improvement over the new 2.5 console. The only down side is that it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. But who cares anyway, Internet Explorer is a piece of shit. You should be using Firefox or even Safari before considering the Microsoft Yugo equivalent of a browser. If you are still in the ice age and still use that junky IE the Fluency admin console will have no ill affects. The Fluency route is the real way to go for those who want a hard core killer upgrade.

Bugs I’ve found so far using the rich text editor in Firefox (annoyances really):

• The Firefox cache seems to remember the last edit style you were in between posts. This means that between posts the editor returns to the last view you used as opposed to honoring the user preference which is “rich text” for me.
• My custom permalinks didn’t work until I reset them after the upgrade. This was a biggie IMHO because the editor always pointed to the numbered post on the main page, as if it was the post slug, although the post should have been using the post name. The end result was that the post ended up on the main page but would return to a “post not found” search page if someone clicked on the hyper-linked title. The same was true for the editor links. A quick trip to the permalink page fixed that after a re-save.
• I believe that Viper007Bond must have written the “add video” buttons because they are very similar to his quite excellent Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin. The difference however is that the 5.4.1 quicktags are more configurable than the built in buttons. I especially like the option to set the default location and size of individual video embeds via the quick tag plugin console.
• I also found that the new editor gets confused quite easily. I rely much more heavily on the HTML view because cut and pastes often have unintended consequences. Munged code, especially with embeds, the inability to remove italics from a cut and paste that has a <code> element inside of <em> tags to name a few recent experiences.
• At one time you used to be able to go to the comment list and click on an IP address to do a whois lookup on arin. This no longer seems to work. Not quite sure what happened here. No matter as I usually go to the meGA Whois for these kind of lookups.
• Hyperlinks have this quirky tendency to stick while typing if you happen to insert one in place without typing past the words you are hyperlinking before hypelinking them up. This is the same as the bold or italics buttons. In other words your typing will be included in the hyperlinked tags unless you type the word or phrase you want hyperlinked and then highlight it and link it up. This is word for Windows ish so no big deal. It is actually a feature if you want to look at it that way.
• Beware those of you with text widgets. My good friend Big Dog is reporting that the upgrade wiped out his text widgets. This is a real bummer and probably poses the worst bug I have seen so far. It could be theme related so it all depends.
• UPDATE: There is a compatibility issue with the sodelind image manager. This is no surprise because the developer kind of abandoned the plugin over a year ago. Too bad because it was pretty slick. If anyone knows of any image manager plugin that lets you browse images on your site image directory please let me know. The developer of the Image Manager Plugin has retrofitted it to fix the 2.5 compatibility issue. It should be ready by end of week. This is great news as the plugin is excellent.

That is about all I’ve found so far. Probably a bit green for many of my users but well worth the upgrade for someone who is comfortable putting up with the quirkiness I mentioned above. Please let me know if you have any issues and I will post them here as an update. - T

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