feisley » Wordpress

Wordpress Code Highlighting

Jacob Feisley — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:59:33 +0000

With as many people blogging on Wordpress that wish to show code snippets I would have thought some better solutions for syntax highlighting would have been available by now. Unfortunately support is limited to only a handful of 3rd party modules each of which having their own limitations or issues that must be overcome.

Here are the various solutions I tried along with my comments:

WP-Syntax (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-syntax/)

Pros:

Simple to use with
```
 tags
```
Uses GeSHi for highlighting resulting in a wide variety of supported languages
Easy to copy code from the page without getting the formatting / line numbers with it

Cons:

Requires some minor tweaks to the CSS to get it to work (perhaps this is just my theme)

SyntaxHighlighter (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/syntaxhighlighter/)

Pros:

The best layout of any of the plugins I tried
Plain and Print views for viewing the source

Cons:

A much more limited set of languages supported
Copying code from the plugin requires a special mode.

Conclusions

After playing with both of these libraries and feeding them a variety of code snippets, I settled upon wp-syntax. While it did require a few modifications to the CSS to get the line numbers to match with the code, the wider variety of supported languages was the key feature for me. I also modified the CSS to match my theme for both the plugins, so out of the box they dont look quite like my pictures shown.

Site Updates (continued)

Jacob Feisley — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 07:24:45 +0000

As I was in the coding mood from my changes last night to my website/blog, I took the next logical step and completely overhauled the entire theme. After heavily modifying a theme I think I have the general look I am wanting.

Some of the notable changes include:

Grouped categories into logical groups.
Better search with context provided along with titles.
New logo based on old site logo + favicon (with a touch of red)
A few other interesting features that I may take advantage of in the near future

Everything should be in place, if anyone notices some stray PHP code or CSS trying to escape, please let me know so I can put it in its place.

Site Updates

Jacob Feisley — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:11:35 +0000

After what has been far too long, I finally took the time to convert my site to using WordPress for all content. Previously I had wanted to have custom PHP run the main site and use WordPress only for the blogging, however, time never seemed to allow me to finish the normal site.

Things still on my list of todo items:

Add some content to the About, Projects, and Contact pages
Fix the header to match for the fileserver
Clean up some of the CSS and other layout stuff

Wordpress 2.5

Jacob Feisley — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:30:47 +0000

Wordpress has been gearing up for their much anticipated 2.5 release. As such I though it only fitting that I upgrade to one of the latest test releases. I installed 2.5 RC 2 and have been nothing but impressed so far. The admin interface is the largest visual overhaul. It is much more streamlined and now offers many new features.

My favorite new addition is the new media management interface. This makes it almost trivial to upload and manage images and other content. This will certainly be useful in the future. Another great aspect to the media manager is the gallery feature, which allows the rapid creation of photo galleries on a given article.

Looking foward to the final release, but at this point the RC 2 seems very stable.