WordPress Quick Tip: Turn off Smileys

September 16th, 2007 Nathan Rice

Smiley FacesThis is just a very quick tip for your WordPress blog. One of the most annoying things about WordPress’s default settings is the fact that smileys are turned on by default. What’s a smiley, you say? When you put characters together like a colon and an closing parenthesis, WordPress replaces the text with a little yellow smiley face. How cute.

The problem is, many times WordPress theme designers put styles in the stylesheet to control any image in the content div that will either float all images or maybe put a border around them. The result is a screwed up story … all because of this “cute” little feature.

On top of that, let’s say you wanted to put an actual parenthetical statement in your blog story. Now imagine that your parenthetical statement ends with the number “8″. You wouldn’t think that would be a problem … but if you have smileys turned on, it is a problem. You end up with a super cool picture of a smiley face wearing a pair of sunglasses. You see, if you put the number “8″ next to a closing parenthesis, you get that little sunglass sporting smiley face. Pretty annoying, huh?

So here’s how to turn them off:

Go to your WordPress admin panel and click on “Options” then “Writing”. In the “Formatting” section, just uncheck the box that says “Convert emoticons … to graphics on display”. Once this is unchecked, you won’t see any more annoying smiley faces.

Whew! That’s better :-)

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5 Responses to “WordPress Quick Tip: Turn off Smileys”

Michael from Pro Blog Design Said:

I suppose it depends on the person. I love smilies. I think it’s the after effects of too many years on too many forums, but I find it hard to leave a comment without them!

(I tried really really hard on this one. ;) )

Comment made on September 24th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Nathan Rice Said:

Michael,
I hear ya man :-) I’m with you, I love using smiley’s but I don’t so much love how WP converts them to graphics.

Nathan

Comment made on September 24th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
smileys Said:

Thanks - I didn’t realize you could turn them off. Although, sometimes I want to use smileys and sometimes I don’t.

:)

Comment made on May 8th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
gio Said:

Thank you, I really needed this…the smileys always screw up the alignment of the following comment in my blog.

Comment made on May 17th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
gio Said:

By the way, any tips on how to enable that “notify me of followup comments via e-mail”?

Comment made on May 17th, 2008 at 2:22 pm

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