We mainly use WordPress as a Content Managment System (CMS) for clients and are always running into issues with the way the WordPress visual editor works. The visual editor is not really a WSIWYG editor as it does not use the styles in the theme, and add to that the wptexturize and wpautop filters, and you get frustrated trying to apply formatting to pages and posts.
There are solutions to completely disable wptexturize and wpautop, “Raw HTML” and “Disable Texturize” plugins.
Now how to get a better WSIWYG editor.
Windows Live Writer seems to have the best inteface, but we still have to get WLW to load the theme CSS files.
At first this seemed straight forward, just use the functionality built into WLW.
Many of the sites kept giving errors that it could not load the theme.
After alot of research and trials, the solution was easy. found the answer in a comment a solution that was more complex.
Solution
- Temporarily change your wordpress Front page displays setting to “Your latest posts”
Dashboard –> Settings –> Reading. - Refresh your theme in WLW.
In the WLW menu, Blogs –> Edit blog settings –> Editing –> Refresh Theme button. - Change the Front page settings back to the original settings.
When using WordPress as a CMS, many sites set the home page to a static page.
WLW loads the theme by creating a temporary post, loading the home page, and then looking for the post that it created. When it can’t find the post it created, it raises an error. Good thing is that WLW deletes the temporary post.