Displaying equations in webpages has always been a headache. The fallback of using images was always there, but in the age of blogs and other content creation tools editing, updating and maintaining images for equations is tedious.

MathML was an effort to standardise support in browsers, but the reality of it is that it only works out of the box in very few cases.

Whilst looking for a way to easily put equations into a WordPress blog, MathJax turned up. Have a look at some of the examples!

### MathJax in WordPress

A quick search turns up a couple of WordPress plugins, of which I ended up using Latex for WordPress, which
allows me to easily put Latex syntax equations directly into posts.

So
{{{
x = frac{-b pm sqrt{b^2 – 4ac}}{2a}
}}}
becomes

$$x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 – 4ac}}{2a}$$

All in all excellent, 😉

Well the Visual Editor mode doesn’t appear to get on very well with the [mediawiki-plugin] – it puts html tags all over the wiki text making updating pages very tedious and making the whole point of using the Wiki syntax a bit redundant.

There do appear to be a few pages on the web talking about having problems with more advanced page layouts when using the Visual Editor, so probably for the best to have it disabled.

There are a few plugins to disable the Visual Editor and Easy Disable Visual Editor appears to do the job with the latest WordPress.

Setting up a new WordPress blog has been very easy, but editing in HTML get pretty tedious when there are alternatives like wiki syntax.

All easily solved with the WP-MediaWiki plugin.

The plugin doesn’t support the complete MediaWiki syntax, but more than enough to be useful.