TinyMCE Advanced Really Enhances WordPress Post Editor

Wordpress 3.9 comes with an updated post editor but still pales to the options you get with the TinyMCE Advanced plugin.  Once you update to WordPress 3.9 you will notice you can drag and drop images into your WordPress post editor directly, it popups up the upload screen and you click insert, then you can drag/resize files around.

This makes it simply and easy to manipulate images

Though you still have to edit the image or click text tab to figure out your width/height size exactly for the images.  You can cut/paste any text, but unfortunately you still can’t paste images in clipboard memory into the post editor directly, if you cut or copy an image into clipboard memory you still have to save the image and then drag it into the post editor or click add media to upload your media.  The one final thing I really needed to switch from Live Writer to using WordPress 3.9 all the time for all post creation is that ability to simply cut an image and paste it directly into the image editor without having to save and upload it first.

TinyMCE Advanced adds quite a bit more menu editor features for you and is a free WordPress plugin found in the WordPress plugin repository here http://wordpress.org/plugins/tinymce-advanced/

File Menu

You get New Document and Print, not sure where the benefit is here of course as why would someone start typing only to print it from the WordPress editor.  I can’t see how many people would use that feature, but the New Document basically just clears everything you have written, think of it as blank your entire typed content rather than save the post and start a new post.

Edit Menu

You get your basic Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Paste as text, Select all and Find and Replace.

Insert Menu

Have your basics here, but I would have liked having an easier way to add an anchor tag without you having to go to the HTML/TEXT editor in WordPress.  This will set the id tag of anything you type, so that when you set an href to that #id it will find and jump to it on the page.  If you don’t know how anchor tags work, then you will have to experiment with it, you basically still have to manually put it around text, as if you select text and type anchor it will replace your text with an image, so it doesn’t save that much time honestly.

Format Menu

Bold and Italic were always quick access buttons or Control B, Control I on keyboard, but you have quicker access now to strikethrough, superscript and subscript.  You also have quick access to your pre and blockquotes for helping your text stand out in sections.

Table Menu

Tables are honestly the most noticeable as they didn’t exist without manual HTML/Text tab coding or a plugin previously and they give easy access to creating tables and the flexibility to merge, split and modify existing tables.

Tools Menu

Source code opens up a popup window for the HTML for your editor, and is literally no different than click on the text tab, but the good thing is because it opens the source code in a popup, it appears some script elements remain intact, so switching between text/visual editor which would break Punchtab/Rafflecopter and other code, doesn’t seem to happen when you use Tools > Source code to look at html source instead to make changes.

WordPress 3.9 does however add better support for pasting in Word document data without having to click on the extra click, but still comes short of replacing Live Writer for convenience even though they won’t be updating Live Writer anymore, it is still just too convenient for me to write posts with, especially ones where I do screenshots.