I have started thinking about displaying little code snippets on my website. And I quickly found out that the out of the box appearance of code samples in WordPress leaves a lot to be desired. So I started hitting the web for plugins and I think I found a winner.

It’s called Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress and it builds upon this project at Google.

Here is the result:

class CreateEvents < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :events do |t|
      t.string :name
      t.datetime :start_time
      t.datetime :end_time
      t.string :description

      t.timestamps
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :events
  end
end

I think it looks really good! I was unable to get the copy to clipboard functionality to work with Safari on my Mac. I am planning on investigating that further. I also wish the plugin was able to automatically detect the language of the code snippet rather than specifying it every time via an attribute, as I can see myself constantly hunting down the keywords for each language.

On a brighter note, I did run across this article on adding custom language highlighting. Very cool!

Update: I have switched over to Easy Google Syntax Highlighter as it supports more languages.