Admin Post Page
The admin post page has two textareas you will be concerned with: The main “Write Post” textarea and the “Optional Excerpt” textarea. With this theme you may want to use both of these textareas. In this post I will tell you how to turn off the “Visual Rich Editor” and modify the size of the two aforementioned textareas.
You see, this theme will automatically make and publish excerpts of your posts — no <−−more−−> tag needed — but if you want to control the excerpt length or post HTML mark-up in the excerpt itself, to post an image in the excerpt, for example, you will need to use the “Optional Excerpt” textarea.
To make these post areas easier to use I have two recommendations:
Turning the Visual Rich Editor Off
To get right to the point, I hate the “Visual Rich Editor.” In my opinion it is very limiting and very difficult to work with. The regular editor is great and for most users quite intuitive. I’m not going to discuss its how-to finer points, but I will tell you how to disable the “Visual Rich Editor.” If you want help on how to use the regular editor, please visit the WordPress Codex.
- Log in to the admin and go to the “Users” page.
- Scroll down that page to “Personal Options.”
- Uncheck the “Use the visual rich editor when writing” checkbox.
- Click the “Update Profile” button.
If you’re using WordPress version 2.2 or later, the steps above are slightly modified, as follows:
- Log in to the admin and go to the “Users” page.
- Choose the “Your Profile” tab
- Under “Personal Options” uncheck the “Use the visual editor when writing” checkbox.
- Click the “Update Profile” button.
If you will have multiple authors, you can make disable the “Visual Rich Editor” by default for all users by doing the following:
- Log in to the admin and go to the “Options” page.
- Then click “Writing” on the sub-menu.
- Uncheck the “Users should use the visual rich editor by default” checkbox found next to “Formatting.”
- Click the “Update Options” button.
This last part does not apply to WordPress version 2.2 users.
Modifying the Admin Textarea Heights
Find the file called “wp-admin.css” located in your /wp-admin/ directory. Open that file, via FTP or through your server admin, and add the following CSS information to the very bottom of the file:
textarea#content { height : 450px; }
textarea#excerpt { height : 200px; }
Change the values in that above to suit your tastes or needs. If your monitor is larger/smaller you may want to change these value. I find this works really well on an 1024×768 resolution screen.
Do note, with the download is some additional CSS for the admin style sheet — for the custom included quicktags.js.
