Am I safe to assume that you are doing things the same way here as on your own forum? If so then it sounds like the work of a third party plugin that perhaps you have active or possibly the WP theme you are using. But I would plump for a plugin first. So let’s start there.

Review your other Wp plugins. Do you have any that may effect links, urls etc., in posts?

This is what happens…

In my forum, as I am typing in a topic or reply, when I attach an image or smiley it does not show as an image or smiley it shows as a, image tag like this:

<img src=”http://www.horseandhack.co.za/wp-content/sp-resources/forum-smileys/amazed.jpg” title=”amazed_jpg” alt=”amazed_jpg” />

Only after I click Submit Post and view the post does it show the images correctly.

So you are saying this is definitely not supposed to do that?

If not I will need to deactivate 1 plugin at a time to see if that could be the problem… yes?

No, it’s definitely not supposed to do that.

You could deactivate one at a time, or deactivate all and reactivate one at a time. Either way, try and figure out what’s causing it.

Hang on – what editor are you using? The only editor that will show the uploaded image file or a smiley inserted into the post is the tinyMCE WYSIWYG editor… the ione we use on this site.

Right I tried deactivating all plugins except simple press with no change.

I have not purchased the TinyMCE Editor plugin (the $ to ZAR exchange rate hurts like hell)- is this required to show images in the post content?

I think there was a little confusion above at first because we read it that images and smileys did not show up in the actual finished, published forum post. But what you were actually saying is that they do not show up during the editing process but are shown as their raw html. Please do correct me of I have that wrong.

As I said above in post #5, the TinyMCE Editor is the only one that can show the actual images/smileys and things like bold. colour etc. It is the closest thing to a WYSIWYG editor for web page text input.

With the default, simple text editor or even the HTML or bbCode editor plugins, you will always see the raw HTML. This is, I am afraid, the way web page text input works unless you wrap it up in a lot of javascript code – which is what the TinyMCE editor is all about.

Yeah sorry, it’s really hard to explain a problem in a way that makes sense … thanks!!

I can only really add that it would be nice to be able to do what you want in all editor types but it really is impossible…