Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

Turning off the full height editor option in WordPress 4.0

10th September 2014

Though I keep a little eye on WordPress development, it is no way near as rigorous as when I submitted a patch that got me a mention on the contributor list of a main WordPress release. That may explain how the full editor setting, which is turned on by default passed by on me without my taking much in the way of notice of it.

WordPress has become so mature now that I almost do not expect major revisions like the overhauls received by the administration back-end in 2008. The second interface was got so right that it still is with us and there were concerns in my mind at the time as to how usable it would be. Sometimes, those initial suspicions can come to nothing.

However, WordPress 4.0 brought a major change to the editor and I unfortunately am not sure that it is successful. A full height editor sounds a good idea in principle but I found some rough edges to its present implementation that leave me wondering if any UX person got to reviewing it. The first reason is that scrolling becomes odd with the editor’s toolbar becoming fixed when you scroll down far enough on an editor screen. The sidebar scrolling then is out of sync with the editor box, which creates a very odd sensation. Having keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+HOME and CTRL+END not working as they should only convinced me that the new arrangement was not for me and I wanted to turn it off.

A search with Google turned up nothing of note so I took to the WordPress.org forum to see if I could get any joy. That revealed that I should have thought of looking in the screen options dropdown box for an option called “Expand the editor to match the window height” so I could clear that tickbox. Because of the appearance of a Visual Editor control on there, I looked on the user profile screen and found nothing so the logic of how things are set up is sub-optimal.  Maybe, the latter option needs to be a screen option now too. Thankfully, the window height editor option only needs setting once for both posts and pages so you are covered for all eventualities at once.

With a distraction-free editing option, I am not sure why someone went for the full height editor too. If WordPress wanted to stick with this, it does need more refinement so it behaves more conventionally. Personally, I would not build a website with that kind of ill-synchronised scrolling effect so it is something needs work as does the location of the Visual Editor setting. It could be that both settings need to be at the user level and not with one being above that level while another is at it. Until I got the actual solution, I was faced with using distraction-free mode all the time and also installed the WP Editor plugin too. That remains due to its code highlighting even if dropping into code view always triggers the need to create a new revision. Despite that, all is better in the end.

Comments:

  • Biranit says:

    Just wanted to say thank you. I was getting worried we’d be stuck with this awful “feature” and couldn’t find a way to disable it! (Didn’t think of looking in the screen options, ha!)

    • John says:

      As it happened, I too was having the same thoughts until I found out what was what with this. Glad that I have helped.

  • Biranit says:

    If you want to disable this option completely for all users, then add this to your theme’s functions.php:

    [code]
    add_action( ‘after_setup_theme’, ‘turn_off_autoresize’ );
    function turn_off_autoresize(){
    set_user_setting( ‘editor_expand’, ‘off’ );
    }
    add_action(‘admin_head’, ‘turn_off_autoresize_css’);
    function turn_off_autoresize_css(){
    echo ‘

    #adv-settings .editor-expand {display:none !important;}
    ‘;
    }
    [/code]

    This sets the user’s setting to expand = off, and hides the option in the ‘screen options’ to turn it on (the latter is perhaps redundant, however if the user sets it on then on the next page load the first function will turn it back off — so it’s best to hide this option altogether).

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