[Plugin: Rich Text Tags] No line breaks in version 1.4

I’ve looked into this a bit. It turns out the line breaks are being saved (view source and you’ll see) but they aren’t being wrapped properly with <p> tags.

If you filter the output of your descriptions with wpautop (for example, echo wpautop( $posttag->description );) WordPress adds those <p> tags back in. However because they aren’t being saved as part of the description itself, TinyMCE ignores those line breaks when it initializes. TinyMCE only recognizes <p> or <br /> line breaks (since it’s basically an HTML processor, and HTML ignores white space).

Is there a way to filter the descriptions with wpautop before they load in the TinyMCE editor, to preserve the linebreaks?

Filtering the content is half the battle.

If you do something like this…

function display_multiline_taxonomy_description($description) {
	return wpautop($description);
}

add_filter('pre_taxonomy_description', 'display_multiline_taxonomy_description');

… you get the intended results, unless you switch over to plain text mode and then back. The editor doesn’t know to treat the line breaks as paragraph breaks.

It does preserve paragraphs on save though, and keeps them when the TinyMCE editor first loads. So for my clients (who don’t need the plain text editor) I’ve manually disabled the plain text version of the tag/category editor and called this the best stop-gap solution until the plugin author fixes the plugin once and for all… which I hope is soon.

You need to replace ‘taxonomy’ in pre_taxonomy_description with the slug of your taxonomy. So if it is called my-taxonomy then the line would read:

add_filter('pre_my-taxonomy_description', 'display_multiline_taxonomy_description');

Thanks Chris.