On the surface it seems like Visual mode is supposed to show your content as it’s going to look when you publish it; However, there are two key ways in which the WordPress Text Editor is not WYSIWYG and I think it’s important to get these out of the way early to avoid disappointment.
The Text Editor is not controlled by your style sheet.
What you see on your live site is formatted by the style sheet of your WordPress theme, but it has no effect on what you see in the Text Editor. There will always be differences between what you see in the Text Editor and what visitors see on the live site, and sometimes those differences can be quite major. That’s why WordPress has the Preview button, so that you can see your post the way your style sheet is going to display it. It’s important to check Preview before your publish or update a post.
The Text Editor thinks of spacing very differently than you.
You are probably used to hitting your carriage return (enter) on a word processor and getting extra space between paragraphs; in other words, the more you “enter”, the more space you get. Not so with the Text Editor. Put as many spaces as you like between paragraphs, but when you click Publish or Update, they all disappear.
My two cents: I add special coding to MANY of my posts including div tags and code. So, I spend a couple of hours writing a post without the Visual Editor. The wife comes along and clicks on the visual editor to take a sneak peak. Guess what, it removed most of the coding/markup. So I highly recommend disabling the WYSIWYG editor.
We learn from our experiences. Happy Coding!
Tags: homepage, Post, Web Design, WordPress
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