A fix for rel attribute being stripped by TinyMCE and breaking highlander

First – thanks Mr. Wolf for sharing your most excellent collapse-o-matic plugin!

This is not a support request; rather a solution to a problem reported a few months ago here: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/trying-to-use-highlanders-on-img-roll-your-own-and-wordpress-wont-save-it/.

I added 2 roll-your-own collapse-o-matic blocks on a page. The two triggers were in separate span tags and targeted two separate divs. I used the highlander method to prevent more than one block from being open at a time. It worked great.

BUT, as soon as I switched out of Text(HTML) mode into Visual mode, the visual editor (TinyMCE) stripped the rel=”uniqueword-highlander” attributes from the span tags.

(NOTE: it’s probably worth pointing out that I’m NOT using shortcodes to do this, rather just HTML.)

I ran a bunch of tests and determined that it was TinyMCE stripping out the “rel” attributes (and stripping the values from the title attribute if present). I did a fresh install of WordPress to test and verify this – with zero plugins, using the Twenty Seventeen theme. As soon as I switch from Visual to Text(HTML), the “rel” attributes are stripped from the HTML.

The solution (reference: https://www.engfers.com/2008/10/16/how-to-allow-stripped-element-attributes-in-wordpress-tinymce-editor/) – a custom function for the child theme functions.php file, which sets the allowed attributes for the container (in this case, a span tag):

function custom_mce_options( $init ) {
    // Command separated string of extended elements
    $ext = 'span[id|title|class|style|rel]';

    // Add to extended_valid_elements if it already exists
    if ( isset( $init['extended_valid_elements'] ) ) {
        $init['extended_valid_elements'] .= ',' . $ext;
    } else {
        $init['extended_valid_elements'] = $ext;
    }

    // Super important: return $init!
    return $init;
}

add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'custom_mce_options');

Hopefully this helps someone…I’m guessing I am not the only one having this problem.

Cheers,

PK