Emily Newsom

As Development Director, Emily oversees all of Brightflock's development projects. Prior to co-launching Brightflock in 2008, Emily developed enterprise Java systems for the biotechnology industry. Emily is an avid proponent of open source software (but without the beard!) and has contributed to a number of OSS projects including Firefox, Ubuntu, WordPress and Drupal. Emily holds an honors BSc in Computer Science from the University of Victoria.

My personal site can be found here

Emily Newsom's blog »
Posted on Saturday, October 29, 2011 in Drupal, Implementation

One of our goals for our new Drupal 7 site launch was to have a better blog section where we could discuss a few of the solutions we come up with to the everyday problems we encounter. For me, that means I need a good way to display formatted code to readers. Enter the GeSHI Filter. This module looked great and did what I wanted. Problem is, the wysiwyg editor, in my case CKEditor, butchered my text in such a way that by the time it got to GeSHI, the output was broken (a wysiwyg butchering something? surprise surprise!).

The solution I came up with was to simply use <pre> and </pre> to surround my code. CKEditor already knows about <pre>, so there was no hacking necessary to get it to leave the formatting alone. Even better, I could just highlight my code in CKEditor and select the "Formatted" paragraph format without typing any tags.

The last step was to get <pre> working with GeSHI Filter. Simply go to your GeSHI Filter options and add "pre" to the list of "generic syntax highlighting tags". You can select a default language if you aren't using <pre> for anything other than code formatting, or when you enter your code, you can quickly disable rich-text and add "language='php'" (css, c, etc) to your pre tag.