I’ve had the unpleasant experience of having to play and experiment with syntax highlighting plugins for any code I’d like to post on here and other blogs. Unfortunately, there’s a ton of options to choose from and many just aren’t up to scratch.
What’s worse is that some have funny syntaxes such as using <pre class=”language”> tags which are easily broken by the wordpress WYSIWYG editor and your code gets mangled. Not only that, but changing over to a better plugin becomes a tedious task if you have to change all those pre tags to shorttags.
I’d like to recommend a plugin which works very well, called SyntaxHighliter Plus by Fred Wu and other contributors. In my opinion, it’s one of the easier plugins to use and makes posting code a breeze.
What inspired this post is I just discovered today that an older post on here was broken because it was using syntax for an older plugin I used (although the plugin is still activated).
If I had used SyntaxHighlighter Plus instead, the worst that would have happened is this:
/*Testing*/ #font { font-size:12px; }
Turning into this (curly braces would actually be square brackets):
{css}
/*Testing*/ #font { font-size:12px; }
{/css}
If anyone has another great syntax highlighter please feel free to recommend it in the comments!