New WordPress Smileys Vs. Older Ones

As mentioned in an earlier post, WordPress has changed their Smiley set. And there has been widespread criticism across the blogosphere, in some of the comments here, comments on other blogs and even on the WordPress Forums. I too was one of the early critics but it really doesn’t matter that much, does it?  Smileys are often used in informal and personal blogposts and the so-called “geeks” rarely use them.

I myself have used them on some of the posts, but the usage here pales in comparison to that on the discussion boards I frequent. Almost all of my posts are laden with these yellow characters and the one forum where I’m Admin, I constantly scour for new ones and update the database!

But there’s some good news for those who hate the newer crop of the yellow people on WordPress. Word on the Forums is that the WP team is discussing changing them and is even looking out for a smiley set that is GPL v2 compliant. So if you know of such a set (or have designed something like that), do drop in a word to WP Support.

Meanwhile, the below table shows the older WP smileys vis-a-vis the newer ones and the text required to generate’em on your posts (just remove the spaces).

OLD SMILEY	NEW SMILEY	CODE (With spaces)
		: )
		: D
		: (
		: o
		8 O
		: ?
		8 )
		: x
		: P
		: |
		; )
		: lol :
		: oops :
		: cry :
		: evil :
		: twisted :
		: roll :
		: ! :
		: ? :
		: idea :
		: arrow :
		: mrgreen :

The older smiley set is taken from the support page here and the newer ones are, of course, self-generated by WP now! Noticed that the evil and twisted smileys are the same? and those for tongue-out and rolleyes are also the same!

P.S: Reynie has an html chart of the old/new smileys here and also includes the “newer” new smileys – :smirk: , :kiss:, :monkey: & :angel:

http://reynewaeter.com/reynie.net/smiley.html