Among all of the features that wordpress has, taxonomy is an important one. Cause all the posts of different post types are categoried here with different taxonomies. ‘Category’ is a such one that comes in wordpress by default for the posts. You may find already that , as an admin you have the ability to create category providing its name, slug, description. But, ever you looked at the field for description ! Boring, isn’t it? How would it be , if it could be a tinmyce editor like the one that a post editor panel has. Let’s try something to do that

Get started !

You might have seen that , in category panel there list page where in the left one can create a new category using the form, here there is a description field. Another one is in the edit page of already created category. Both these two are plaing textarea. We are gonna change these two now.

Firstly a point that i wanna mention is that, there are two filters that trigger in two different pages. One in the list page of category which is called “category_add_form_fields” and another in the edit panel of category page which is called “edit_category_form_fields” . We are going to hook a function with these two filters that is going to add the wordpress tinymce editor. Thus we will get our desired editor in both pages.

add_filter('category_add_form_fields', 'cat_description');
add_filter('edit_category_form_fields', 'cat_description');
function cat_description($tag)
{
    ?>
    <div>
    	<table class="form-table">
            <tr class="form-field">
                <td>
                <div><label for="description"><?php _ex('Description', 'Taxonomy Description'); ?></label></div>
                <?php
                    $settings = array('quicktags' => true, 'textarea_name' => 'description' );
                    wp_editor(wp_kses_post($tag->description , ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), 'cat_description', $settings);
                ?>
                <br />
                <span class="description"><?php _e('You can write something here as description !'); ?></span>
                </td>
            </tr>
        </table>
    </div>
        
    <?php
}

We have done it but we also need to remove category’s default textarea , caue we don’t need that anymore. So, let’s add a function to run when admin_head action triggers.

add_action('admin_head', 'remove_default_category_description');
function remove_default_category_description()
{
    global $current_screen;
    if ( $current_screen->id == 'edit-category' )
    {
    ?>
        <script type="text/javascript">
        jQuery(function($) {
            $('textarea#description').closest('tr.form-field').remove();
			$('#tag-description').remove();
        });
        </script>
    <?php
    }
}

‘wp_kses_post’ and ‘wp_kses_data’ are wordpress function that strip html when displaying the content , so we need to remove those. Cause, some we may want to add description as html. Add this code for that.

remove_filter( 'pre_term_description', 'wp_filter_kses' );
remove_filter( 'term_description', 'wp_kses_data' );

That’s it ! Pretty cool, right ? Hope, you will be able to add description how you want now . 🙂

Hope you will feel free to share and let others know what knew. Thank you 🙂