Posting source code on a WordPress hosted blog

May 4, 2012 · Follow on Twitter and Mastodon

At the time of writing, this code-oriented blog was hosted on Wordpress. Since I post a lot of code, I wanted the blog to have nice syntax highlighting. This is how you do it on Wordpress.

At first, the syntax highlighting on my Wordpress blog was pretty horrible. The reason for this was that Wordpress hosted sites have limitations when it comes to themes and plugins. Since I was yet to find a good way to handle code, I wrapped code in a pre tag and highlighted it with a color.

A couple of weeks ago, I found a post by the WordPress team that descibes how to get nice syntax highlighting. It turns out it is very easy, using the sourcecode markup:

[code language=”css”]
your code here
[/code]

If you use this markup, WordPress will format the source code correctly. It supports many different languages, e.g. C#, Java, JavaScript, CSS, XML etc. Have a look at this blog post for examples.

Thanks, WordPress!