Feed Styler logo courtesy of Brett Terpstra from Circle Six Design.
The Feed Styler plugin has been updated to allow images to show up styled in feed readers (such as FeedDemon) that strip styles. I will dedicate the rest of this post detailing the significance of this feature.
How WordPress Positions Images
For anybody using the WYSIWYG (or Visual) Editor on WordPress, you can easily add and position images. The attributes that WordPress adds to position the images, however, are deprecated.
The deprecated attributes that WordPress adds are:
- hspace – Specifies the white space to the left and right of the image.
- vspace – Specifies the white space to the top and bottom of the image.
- border – Specifies the size of the border around the image.
- align – Specifies the alignment of the image
For each image, you must manually specify a border width, horizontal space, vertical space, and alignment. These are hard-coded into each image.
Now what if you wanted to change the border width for all images? You would have to go into each page where images are added and modify the code for every single image. The same is true for vertical and horizontal space.
Why the Deprecated Tags are Still Relevant
The deprecated tags are still relevant because in the feed readers that strip styles, the images show up correctly. However, these deprecated tags should be kept out of your main content.
The Solution
How do you keep the deprecated tags out of your content, but still allow the image to show up correctly in the feed? By using your WordPress CSS file to position the image, and using Feed Styler to make sure the image shows up correct in the feed.
In your code, you’ll be able to specify a generic style (such as class=”right”), and have the image show up correctly in your content and in your feed without having to add any extra markup to your code. This will save you a lot of time in the long run, especially if you include a lot of images in your feeds.
For those interested, I have set up a tutorial on how to style your images using Feed Styler.
