Emoticons and Wordpress

Emoticons and WordPress

Posted in Popular, Wordpress on Mar 6, 2009 by dani

According to Wikipedia…

An emoticon is a textual portrayal of a writer’s mood or facial expression. They are often used to alert a responder to the tenor or temper of a statement, and can change and improve interpretation of plain text. Early emoticons go back to the 1800s and commonly arose when casual/humorous writing was common. The emoticons on the Internet can largely be traced back to a proposal by Scott Fahlman in a message of 19 September 1982.

Emoticons in WordPress

There’s a default set of emoticons that come with every install of wordpress and are located in the folder wp-includesimagessmilies. Before they will show in your blog posts, the emoticons must first be enabled within the admin panel located under Settings → Writing. Make sure the box “Convert emoticons” is checked.

Style your emoticons

You can style the emoticons using the following image class:

img.wp-smiley

For example, remove the border around the emoticon and give it some space by adding the following code to your stylesheet:

img.wp-smiley { border: 0; padding: 0 2px; }

Use your emoticons

The following chart is the text/code needed to produce the corresponding smiley/emoticon.

View source (or copy-able text )

Change your emoticons

So enough fun with the boring ol’ default emoticons, you can change them to anything you want! There are a couple ways to do this.. Personally, I prefer to just change them out myself rather than use yet another plugin But there are plugins that will do it as well.

If you want to change out the default emoticons yourself, first backup the original ones! All you have to do is replace the old emoticons with your new ones making sure to name the new ones the same name as the corresponding default ones. Be sure and keep copies of the emoticons you are using because they will be replaced if you upgrade your blog automatically via plugin or admin panel on version 2.7 and up.

WordPress Emoticon Plugins

If you would rather use a plugin to do change them, here are a few that I found:
Tango Smileys Extended – disables the built-in WordPress smileys and extends the number of available smileys from 18 to 202.
Smilies Themer – allows you to use smilies (emoticons) themes (or packs) to replace the wordpress default ones
Smiley Switcher – With this plugin you can choose a smiley pack from the settings / options in admin or simply choose your own smiley pack directory.

Download New Emoticons

Find all sorts of different emoticons at the following links…
Aqua Smilies – created for WordPress
White Emoticons Pack – created for WordPress
Xpressions Emoticon Pack – created for WordPress, 4 different color choices
Animated Chinese Emoticons – Animated emoticons and plugin
12 Emoticon Packs – 12 free super cute emoticon packs
GreenSmilies
Smileygarden
World of Smilies
TechFaq – Over 6000 completely free emoticons.

Learn more…

Using Smilies – WordPress Codex
Add Smilies To Your WordPress Blog with Smilies Themer – WordPress Hacks
The Art of Smilies in WordPress Blogs – Lorelle on WordPress

:lol: :x

Author: dani
Web designer/front-end web developer who hugs trees, loves animals, and is totally addicted to social media. :) Find me @ danimcdaniel.com or tweet me @dani!

Cedric Nocon says:

Ohhh, thanks for the links!

Friday, 6 March, 2009 at 18:38

Goran says:

I love your design style of this blog. Inspiring.

Thursday, 19 March, 2009 at 16:27

Cza says:

Wonderful post, a very informative one as I see it. Any idea how to make custom emoticon packs? I’d appreciate it very much if you could post a tutorial on this.

Saturday, 21 March, 2009 at 8:03

Smiley says:

long live the smiley

Friday, 10 April, 2009 at 17:19

online forex currency trading says:

I’m so confused. I can’t figure out how to get this plugin to work. I see some commenters have used them as comment replies, but I don’t see any smilies to click on.

Thursday, 7 May, 2009 at 23:54

ozdoby says:

I love Emoticons

Thursday, 21 May, 2009 at 7:03

forex says:

im new to this can someone show me how to install the emoticons. also, just i’m finding it annoying that i cant get the plugins to work, is it really that difficult.

Tuesday, 26 May, 2009 at 20:12

Manny Pacquiao says:

Cool! I’m going to put alien emoticons on my blog, lol.
Manny Pacquiao´s last blog ..Manny Pacquiao Defeats Ricky Hatton

Tuesday, 16 June, 2009 at 23:38

anky says:

i love it!

Friday, 26 June, 2009 at 2:46

Network Cabling says:

Great list of EMO , thx for providing downloading and emo list.

Tuesday, 14 July, 2009 at 2:28

Romarto / custom web site designer says:

Hi Dani ! I see this emoticons is good suit for your blog
It will be nice to use emoticons like we have in msn messenger (yes, they are big, but very funny
Is there possibility to upload big custom emoticons (50×50 size or more) ?

Wednesday, 29 July, 2009 at 5:08