The Prologue theme for WordPress brings some of the lessons of Twitter, and microblogging generally, to WP: make posting easy and cut down on distracting things like titles and complicated toolbars. The people at Automattic designed Prologue to help them communicate internally and we’re going to try doing the same with the theme for contexts (using the More Privacy Options plugin to keep the blog private).

However, one aspect of Prologue’s minimalism is problematic: there’s no quicktags or rich text editor at all. Personally, I see no problem with this. However, the effectiveness of this blog depends on people who are not me using it, so I tried to add one. I found this guide to adding a TinyMCE Editor to Prologue, but couldn’t get it to work. I don’t particularly like WYSIWYG editors anyway, so my Plan B was to try to add HTML quicktags to the theme…and succeeded! Thanks to Alex King’s JS Quicktags and a few CSS tweaks to match the minimalism of the Prologue theme, we’ve now got a cool, understated set of Quicktags at the top of our Prologue post box:

Prologue with Quicktags

The script is really simple to install: just copy Alex King’s script to your server, link to it in your head and add the link right before your “posttext” textarea in the template. (He includes an example in the download. Just be sure to point the script to “posttext.”) After that I just cut out a lot of the excess buttons directly from the js_quicktags.js file, only keeping the ones people would actually need. And here’s the CSS I used for the buttons:

#ed_toolbar_posttext {
    margin: 0.5em 0 0.5em 0em;
}
.ed_button {
   margin: 0 8px 0 0;
   padding: 2px;
   height: 20px;
   border: none;
   background: none;
   color: #aaa;
}