One of my pet peeves with WordPress is how the default action is for it to substitute annoying image “smilies” for any text emoticon you use. Personally, I don’t like having all of those little yellow icons dotting my pages and posts, so the first thing I’ve always done in a new install was to UNcheck the box next to “Convert emoticons like :-) and :-P to graphics on display” in the Writing settings. Annoyingly enough, it’s checked by default since the WordPress developers have decided we must like smilies or something.
Anyway, with the release of WordPress 4.1, this setting option has disappeared from any brand-new installs (it’s still showing if you have an earlier database version). I was scratching my head and reading the WordPress forums to find out why. It seems the core team felt they needed to clean up the settings area and get rid of the “Formatting” section from the Writing settings so it would be more streamlined. They felt most people left those settings “as-is”, so it was better to just get rid of the option to change them.
Grrrrrrr….
So, I found a couple of solutions which entailed editing some WordPress core files (which I feel is ALWAYS a no-no), then discovered a simple way to fix it. You can go to
/wp-admin/options.php
to see the hidden options page in your dashboard.
CAUTION:Changing the wrong options here or formatting them incorrectly could break your site – proceed carefully.
From there, look for the “use_smilies” option, remove the “1” from there (make it blank), then click the save button at the bottom of the page. That’s it. Simple. It does the same thing as unchecking the box used to do. You can also add a line of code to your functions.php page, but this is much simpler.
If you don’t want to do either of the above (i.e. if editing your options page seems a little too scary since you could end up breaking your site if you accidentally change something else), you can use a simple plugin I built and posted to the WordPress repository:
It’s only a single line of code (the same one you’d put in your functions file), so it doesn’t add anything in terms of load to your WordPress site.
Comments 3
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I’d just migrated my blog and had to do a new install of WordPress, and I was fuming when I’d discovered that the option to uncheck the smilies box was gone! Needless to say, I was not pleased by all the yellow emoticons popping up on my posts.
So thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
Author
I know! Isn’t it annoying that they removed that option? Glad you could use the plugin (or my instructions here) to fix it!
:)