Wrestling with WordPress

By kate on May 7th, 2007

As I move my content from various places (LiveJournal, static HTML) into WordPress, I’ve had my share of tussles with WordPress over how everything looks. I made a number of modifications to my theme (Green Lush 2 Column). The CSS can be complicated but at least it can be mastered eventually. I accept the complexity in exchange for the control I get over the layout and design.

My biggest struggle, though, has been over line breaks, of all things. I don’t know if it’s something with this theme in particular or WordPress in general, but I’m having a hard time getting WordPress to always skip a line between paragraphs. The problem is not the style of the paragraph… that’s set correctly. The problem is that WordPress will sometimes swallow up a line break and smoosh two paragraphs together. This tends to happen at least once in every entry with more than two paragraphs.

I tried many things to impose my will. I re-entered all the line breaks in the WYSIWYG editor. I manually added break and/or paragraph tags in the HTML editor. Nothing worked consistently!

I finally came to a compromise solution, which is stupid but always works. After writing or importing an entry, I switch to the HTML editor and put a   (blank space) on the empty line between each paragraph.

If you’ve encountered this issue yourself, I’d love to hear about it.