Word of warning about WordPress 2.5’s post editor bug (#)

WordPress’ post editor (found in Write Post page) is quite handy, and uses the TinyMCE visual editor for its WYSIWIG editor for its visual mode of writing.

However, being web-based, it has its share of woes too. Apart from wrecking with posted code, it also has one other fatal flaw that I realized a bit too late - which is why I am writing this to warn you of it (so that you may not get into trouble).

After polishing up the original draft of my previous post “Does your blog have a Top Posts page?“, I hit the ‘Publish’ button promptly. Immediately after hitting the publish button, all the text disappeared from the content box in the ‘write post’ page. Although I ignored it as usual, an error page hit me soon - stating that the post could not be published.

I was offline while writing the post, and connected to the internet shortly before hitting the ‘publish’ button. However, this has been my habit for quite some time, and there has never been any error until WordPress 2.5, which gives me reason to believe that this could be the result of WordPress dashboard revamp.

Now, out of sheer instinct, I copy-paste the entire post content into a blank Notepad document (.txt) just before publishing the post. Once the post has been published, I check the post and then remove the .txt file which contains the post content.

Of course, there is a chance that your computer goes poof! and the post editor looses your post at the same moment, but perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic here

May 6th, 2008