Mike Southby

Easy; well you’d have thought so wouldn’t you?

For a while now I have been trying various different ways to try and achieve something which let’s face it, should be really simple – how do you add an empty line into a WordPress blog.  I thought that I must be missing something fundamentally obvious; I couldn’t believe that this was not possible in an up-to-date release of WordPress.

Surely the ability to do this was not missed out? Almost everyone wants to add empty or blank lines to format their text. Often you need to add a little bit of white space to make the post look clean or in my case, after inserting an image into your post so that the following text looked properly aligned.  But in WordPress it seems like they’ve gone to great effort to make this an impossible and death defying feat.  Personally, I just don’t get it.

If you enter a blank line in the WYSIWYG editor, as soon as you click on the save or publish button, all of the empty lines disappear and all of your text gets crunched up again.  Type them back in and save. Poof! Like magic they disappear again, gone.  What’s that all about?!

So I thought about doing it the manual way, by coding them manually in the html view (which when you think about it defeats the object, you shouldn’t need to know html to be a blogger as the WYSIWYG editor should decipher the html for you…), did that work? No.

I’d tried all the things I could think of.  Nothing seemed to work, as soon as I hit the save or publish button any code that I had put in disappeared into cyberspace never to be seen again.  There doesn’t seem to be any conclusive solution in the WordPress support forums either which isn’t very helpful.  The best solution that I could find was to increase the paragraph spacing in css, but that wasn’t really something I wanted to do.

I did a lot of searching around various sites and kept hitting a brick wall, there do seem to be a lot of people having the same problem – with various potential workarounds – but doesn’t seem to be any consistent solutions, what seems to work for some doesn’t for others.  I guess that’s the beauty of all the customised installations, themes and plug-ins etc.  Most people are overcoming the problem by installing various plug-ins to stop WordPress from stripping out the code.  Messy; all these extra plug-ins increase the burden to the default WordPress installation and eventually slow things down, again not something I want to happen.

So, how have I achieved it?

Well, I came across it by chance when I was writing a post and had to ‘play back’ what I had done to find the solution.  It’s actually really simple.

On the WYSIWYG editor place the cursor where you want the blank line to appear, next click the html editor tab.  Hit the code button and overtype the word ‘code‘ with ‘br’ on the screen within the < and >.  Save.  That’s it..!

Seems to work great for me; let me know if you find this useful.