HTML Tidy for WordPress

Published on November 23, 2009

I was out and about in the SitePoint forums today and someone had a very simple request:

I would like to get the “generated source” (viewing the source in a browser) of WordPress to be properly formatted and indented.

It sounded simple enough and, as an OCD developer, I can understand why one might want their markup to look good underneath the hood.  After a bit of searching, I found exactly the thing that would do it.

HTML Tidy for WordPress is a plugin that runs your WordPress-generated pages through HTML Tidy.  The plugin requires the PHP Tidy module, which isn’t usually installed by default.  Unfortunately, in previous attempts, I’ve found PHP Tidy rather difficult to install on my CentOS server.  Maybe there is a chance of seeing this plugin adapted to use a pure PHP-based solution such as HTML Purifier?  The plugin does support Hyper Cache, however, which means that it shouldn’t put a drain on performance.

Overall, this is a really great idea, but eliminating that Tidy dependency would make this more useful to a wider range of developers.

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2 Responses to HTML Tidy for WordPress

  1. Benjamin Wittorf says:
    November 25, 2009 at 11:21 am

    Hey Cory,

    Thank you for writing about my plugin!
    And about that dependency – I’m with you on that and currently developing a plugin version that doesn’t require Tidy anymore (with the aforementioned HTML purifier). As for now, I just didn’t know there was a demand for that, so I’ll accelerate development.

    For php5-tidy on CentOS, you might try this.

    Thanks again!
    - Ben

  2. Cory LaViska says:
    November 30, 2009 at 7:57 pm

    Ben, thanks for the tip. I’m sure you’ll have a killer plugin once that Tidy dependency is out of the way (I will definitely use it!). Keep me updated on your progress and I’ll be happy to give the new version its own writeup :)