WordPress Snippets

As WP Snippets is going to focus on Wordpress codes and tips, it was very important that we had a good code syntax highlighter to separate the content from the code clearly, and ensure the display wasn’t messed up by the visual editor!

There are quite a number out there (at least 8!) that do the job, but it was difficult to sieve/test through so many when the new site was going live in a very short time, and it was then that I stumbled upon Chris Cagle’s excellent article:

The Definitive Guide on Wordpress Syntax Highlighter Plugins

The article gives a comprehensive review of 8 different code syntax highlighters that work for Wordpress 2.6, including (in alphabetical order)

• Code Colorer by Dmytro Shteflyuk
• Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress by Peter Ryan
• Highlight Source Pro by Christian Knoflach
• Snippet Highlight by Roland Rust
  
• Syntax Highlighter Plus by Fred Wu (with matt, Viper007Bond, mdawaffe)
• WP-Chili by Andrea Ercolino
• WP-Codebox by Eric Wang
• WP-Syntax by Ryan McGeary

The plugins have then been ranked in terms of their overall rating in ‘colouring/coloring abilities’ (with colour screen-shots for comparison included!) and their ‘ease of use’, where WP-Chili came out top in the colour rankings (which is what Chris Cagle is using, and he has helpfully provided what he uses on Cagintranet Web Design) but Syntax Highlighter Plus was #1 for ‘ease of use’.

I found the whole guide extremely helpful, and have now ended up using Syntax Highlighter Plus for WP Snippets - it did help that it was ranked #1 overall! However, given that Andrea Ercolino has updated WP-Chili since the review, I really might look into changing over!

If you are looking out for a good Wordpress plugin that highlights code in colour/color for Wordpress 2.6, then The Definitive Guide on Wordpress Syntax Highlighter Plugins is definitely the article that you would not want to miss reading. To be fair, not every plugin has been updated recently (at least two are from 2007, and the most dated plugin in the list is Code Colorer from May 2007) but nevertheless, it is still an excellent guide worth archiving!

WP-Table plugin by Alex Boelinger is a unique Wordpress plugin that allows admins to create tables, by this I mean the ones with rows and columns like in Excel, easily in Wordpress. It is the only one that I am aware of at the moment that makes it possible to add actual tables without putting-in extra HTML when creating new posts and pages.

However, activating the latest version (1.52) of the plugin triggers a fatal error (shown below) in Wordpress 2.5+:

Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.

Fortunately there is a quick fix that can be done to resolve this issue, where the full credit for this solution goes to Michael Bester, the developer of the Kimili Flash Embed, who posted a comment on Jovel Stefan’s Embedded Video Plugin post about a fix to ensure that a plugin should check for the buttonsnap class upon activation.

This class is used to add a button to your Wordpress editor, and should only ever be loaded once, so if any other plugin uses buttonsnap, it will cause the fatal error to occur.

To resolve this problem, find Line 344 in wp-table.php

require_once(WPTABLE_ABSPATH.'js/buttonsnap.php');

and add before it:

if(!class_exists('buttonsnap'))

So ultimately you should see this:

// ButtonSnap needs to be loaded outside the class in order to work right
if(!class_exists('buttonsnap'))
require_once(WPTABLE_ABSPATH.'js/buttonsnap.php');

I tested this on a local install of Wordpress 2.5.1, and it worked very well. This quick fix has also been posted on the Wordpress Support Forums, and hopefully others will find it helpful as well.

Any feedback would be brilliant! If it works for you, please let me know by posting in the comments. Similarly, if it doesn’t work for you, then again, please do post! I don’t see the plugin requiring any further edits for the time being (apart from new features) and am confident that it will also work with later Wordpress versions as well.

UPDATE 20/07/08: Apparently the plugin does work with WP 2.6!
UPDATE 28/12/08: And in WP 2.7 as well!