Plugin : No Curly Quotes
One of the most annoying things WordPress does is to turn perfectly good inverted commas and double quotes into curly quotes ‘ ’ and “ ”. This might look pretty (depending on what font you're using, it actually looks rather ugly), but if you're using WordPress to share snippets of code, it messes things up horribly.
I blogged before about how to turn this behaviour off manually; as a commenter on that post wrote, "I can't believe WordPress doesn't allow you to turn this behaviour off in the Dashboard".
Here's the next best thing. This plugin allows you to turn off curly quotes not only for post content, but for titles, comments and excerpts. Each element can be controlled separately through an options panel, so if you decide you want pretty curly quotes in titles but proper straight quotes in post content, that's fine. Out of the box, it turns curly quotes off in all four elements.
How to install
Download the zip file, unzip, upload to /wp-content/plugins/ and activate through WP's admin. Settings can be changed through Settings > No Curly Quotes. There's no need to edit any theme files.
I know there are a couple of plugins already around that perform a similar function. However, I believe this is the only one that treats titles, content, comments and excerpt separately. And FWIW, it's *not* named after wptexturize, the WordPress function it turns off - so it should be easier to find for those who don't know the ins and outs of core code too.
Tags: my plugins
Posted by Sue on August 16, 2009 in WordPress.
Hi Sue, great solution to get rid of the curly quotes, but that means yet another plugin to deal with. For the people who like to dive into their code, there is another way of doing it, without the need for the plugin.
It has been described on Totally WordPress and it is basically adding 1 line of code to the functions.php file.
EDIT can't add code to your blog, so follow the link to see how...
Yes Piet, I blogged that myself back in May
http://blogmum.com/2009/05/stop-wordpress-breaking-code-in-your-posts/
as I linked at the beginning of my post.
Actually if you want to turn it off for comments, titles, and excerpts as well as post content, it's four lines of code. And lots of people don't like to dive into PHP.
Hi Sue,
thanks for the plugin. I'm wondering, does this retroactively go back to swap out curly quotes that have already been written in posts, or only effect new stuff? I've tried various plugins and the manual version too, but I'm still seeing curly quotes in my posts (stuff I imported from Blogger, so maybe that's the problem).
- S