Web Talk

A new feature introduced by WordPress 2.6 is the image caption which automatically adds under every picture in your blog a brief description of your choice. If you read well what I just wrote you should notice the term automatically. This mean that, by default, the aforementioned feature is always on and you don’t have any option to disable it. The code    [ caption ] and [ /caption ] which encloses the IMG, OBJECT or EMBED HTML elements will translate into <div> and </div> CSS attributes to position caption, accordingly.

Here is a brief example:

If you don’t like the idea of having a caption text under your medias (image and videos), here is a little trick to disable and turn it off.

1. Start your FTP client and gain access to your blog’s root.
2. Look for this file located in public_html : wp-config.php or this file located in your theme’s folder (public_html/wp-content/themes/yourtheme): functions.php.
3. Add this code wherever you want in the file: define(’CAPTIONS_OFF’, true);

This little trick will no longer be supported starting from WordPress 2.6.1. As a matter of fact the new WordPress version will have a caption disabling function support via plugin’s filter.

The new caption feature also introduces another important issue which webmasters might face in their themes after upgrading to the new WordPress version. As a matter of fact, WordPress 2.6 adds a DIV code to print the caption title under the picture or image, and to do that it uses a default auto alignment, color, font, and spacing. Because of this, webmasters could notice that the text around an image or a video may not be aligned properly or too close to the picture or video itself. To solve this issue here is a piece of code to add to the theme’s style.css file:

/* Captions */
.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}
/* End captions */

If you wish to know and understand more about alignement issue, please take into account to visit these two WordPress forum’s topics click here and here.

Edit: Here is another couple of ways to disable the caption features in WP:

1) Add this to your theme’s functions.php file:
function no_caption($deprecated, $attr, $content) { return $content; };
add_filter(’img_caption_shortcode’, ‘no_caption’, 10, 3);

2) Alternatively, add this to your theme’s functions.php file:
define(‘CAPTIONS_OFF’, true);

3) Add this to your theme’s functions.php file: add_filter(‘disable_captions’, create_function(‘$a’,'return true;’));