Add Editor Styles in WordPress

The Five Minute Guide to Add Editor Style

Do you add regular content to your WordPress site? If so, you know the drill… Log in to the admin dashboard, click that “add new” post button, and proceed to stare at the screen write captivating and meaningful content.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent as much time tinkering with my site design and typography as I have writing content. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could enjoy all of my site styles from within the post editor screen? Turns out I can! And so can you.

Today I’ll show you how, in 5 minutes or less, to apply your site’s styles to your post editor. That means you can see your site fonts, colors, and sizes within your editor, making it easier to preview your content without actually previewing it. 🙂

Add Editor Style to Your Site

We’re going to use add_editor_style, a function available in WordPress core, to do the trick. Simply drop the following into your site’s functions.php file (or wherever you add custom functionality in your site).

add_action( 'init', 'cd_add_editor_styles' );
/**
* Apply theme's stylesheet to the visual editor.
*
* @uses add_editor_style() Links a stylesheet to visual editor
* @uses get_stylesheet_uri() Returns URI of theme stylesheet
*/
function cd_add_editor_styles() {
add_editor_style( get_stylesheet_uri() );
}

Now go check out a post and you’ll see the magic in action! That’s it!

Note that I’m just using my theme’s stylesheet, which may bring in some styles to my editor that I don’t want (i.e. set widths, padding, margins, etc.). If you only want to bring in font-related styles, create a separate stylesheet and link to that instead of your theme stylesheet.

In the function above, remove get_stylesheet_uri() and replace it with 'your-custom-styles.css' (in quotes).

Props

Thanks to  AJ Clarke over at WPExplorer.com for introducing me to style in the post editor screen and pointing me to the add_editor_style function reference in the WordPress Codex.

33 thoughts on “The Five Minute Guide to Add Editor Style”

  1. Hi Carrie,

    I love your wry effervescent energy and astute wordpress and freelancing insights! I find myself cracking up often as I read through your posts. I’m an official subscriber now. 🙂

    I love the idea of this thing soooo much but I am unable to get The Five Minute Guide to Add Editor Style to work. Here’s what I did:
    – I replaced get_stylesheet_uri() in functions.php with edit-style.css (lives in the root of my child theme and contains one initial test style).
    – I upload the functions.php (also btw in root of my child theme) along with edit-style.css but when I go to the visual editor of any page or post on my site, I see no evidence of the new style. Just the same old styles (Heading 1-6, paragraph, preformatted).

    My theme is a child of Twenty Fifteen, and my WordPress version is 4.4.1.

    Would you possibly have any idea what the issue is?

    Thanks for any thoughts – I know you’re very busy.

    Susan
    p.s. um – heh heh – please kindly overlook my pathetic archaic ancient website which I am updating in a couple weeks – i swear.

  2. Hello Carrie, Forgive me for vanishing for a couple weeks (I forgot to click “Notify me of new comments via email”)(I won’t this time). Yes, i cleared my cache and tried it two ways: with the function calling in my main stylesheet (get_stylesheet_uri()) and then with the function calling my custom ‘edit-style.css’ stylesheet that has just one style in it. But only the standard Visual Editor styles continue to show (paragraph, six header styles and preformatted). You explanation couldn’t be clearer – what on earth can I be doing wrong?

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