found drama

In preparation for an up-coming post ¹, I did a bit of extra legwork on syntax highlighting plugins for WordPress and wound up switching from Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress (GSHW) ² to SyntaxHighlighterPro. Both of them are backed by Alex Gorbatchev’s Syntax Highlighter library. But more on that in a moment.

What prompted the switch was the fact that I noticed that GSHW was mangling some CSS syntax highlighting operations. The regex used to grab hex colors was getting greedy and highlighting #id-selectors as if they were colors ³. After a little digging, I came to discover that GSHW was using a quite-out-of-date version of Gorbatchev’s library.

Exploring the Syntax Highlighter site a bit, I found a couple of other plugins that appeared to be more up-to-date. I gave a crack at SyntaxHighlighter Evolved and the above mentioned SyntaxHighlighterPro. Both had more recent versions ⁴ of the library baked in. Both seemed a step up in that regard, but I went with -Pro because it was going to require the fewest tweaks and changes ⁵ in the code samples already posted ⁶ and also because its control panel offered the ability to toggle specific syntaxes at will.

That said, the “Evolved” plugin has a nice suite of options.

This is likely just a temporary stop-gap measure, however. I may pull the plug on the plugins and just drop in Gorbatchev’s script directly–the latest version appears to offer on-demand loading of the “brush” scripts. Combine that with a minified version of the script and that may prove a better overall solution than the plugins can offer.

Nevertheless, the problem remains that the CSS highlighter “brush” script needs some work. It doesn’t really seem to recognize common selectors (#id and .class selectors, I’m looking at you)… and this bugs me.

But until then…

1. Quite likely the next post…[↩]
2. Which I’ve been using for a few months now.[↩]
3. Meaning that it was only coloring the hash and the first six characters of #container.[↩]
4. Though neither was using the most recent version.[↩]
5. I.e., it more gracefully relented to my efforts to kludge in the AppleScript and Sass support.[↩]
6. I.e., -Pro recognized the <pre> formatted blocks whereas Evolved was going to require changing all those to use BBCode-style [bracket] syntax. Ick.[↩]

About Rob Friesel