I’ve hacked together my own WordPress template for fun and posterity to integrate into my site. See, I’m a pretty big newbie to all of this, and it didn’t help that the /blog directory under my main site actually pulls from a separate blog directory one level up (don’t ask me why I did this, I was probably drunk – in hindsight it’s pretty obviously boneheaded). Regardless, I had a suspicion that this had something to do with why the syntax highlighting wasn’t working. I did searches and couldn’t really turn up many good results. It seemed pretty obvious that most people with normal working blogs weren’t having issues.

I ended up looking at the plugin code in the WordPress plugins editor to see if there was something obvious causing it. I spent about 15 minutes looking through it when I figured that there was some kind of issue resolving the directory/URL structure between where the blog was being included and where it was actually located. I found the following code:

// Initalize the plugin by registering the hooks
 function __construct() {
 // Check WordPress version
 if ( !function_exists( 'plugins_url' ) ) return;

 // Load localization domain
 load_plugin_textdomain( 'syntaxhighlighter', false, '/syntaxhighlighter/localization' );

 // Register brush scripts
 wp_register_script( 'syntaxhighlighter-core',             plugins_url('syntaxhighlighter/syntaxhighlighter/scripts/shCore.js'),            array(),                         $this->agshver );
 wp_register_script( 'syntaxhighlighter-brush-as3',        plugins_url('syntaxhighlighter/syntaxhighlighter/scripts/shBrushAS3.js'),        array('syntaxhighlighter-core'), $this->agshver );

I figured it had something to do with the function

plugins_url()

not returning the correct location of the plugins directory where Syntax Highlighter is located. I figured it couldn’t resolve the location of the plugins directory and therefore couldn’t find the JavaScripts that color the code. I spent about an hour tooling around with

plugins_url()

trying to get it to work in various ways and permutations, all to no avail.

I was starting to get frustrated when I noticed, for the first time, right next to the code editor a list of plugin files to edit. One of them was titled ReadMe.txt. “What the hell,” I figured, it can’t hurt to take a look at it. I scrolled down about half way until I saw a FAQ. Right there, in the middle of the page, like a veritable bullhorn shouting, “You freaking moron!!!” at me, was my solution.

The code is just being displayed raw. It isn’t being converted into a code box or anything. What’s wrong?

The answer, of course, was to call the

wp_footer()

function in the blog’s footer. Man, did I feel like a jackass. Here I was, making things difficult, wearing my Big Boy Coder’s™ pants, trying to hack up functions and make things more complicated than they are, when all I had to do was RTFM like the noob that I am and find the function to include.

So naturally, the first thing I had to do (after fixing it) was write a post about it rife with Syntax Highlighting. Thanks, Alex Gorbatchev.

So that’s about it.