Get Cool with both Custom and Default WordPress Smilies and Emoticons

If you’re smilies person, then WordPress offers over twenty default emoticons for you to use in your posts, pages, and comments. But do you know the text code for each? We’ve got a list below. As well, we’ll also cover a few plugins you might be interested in if you’d like to branch out beyond the default smilies and add some customization to your comment form.

Default WordPress Smilies

WordPress comes with a number of default smilies/emoticons built in (more than 20).  Below is a list for their text codes. (You can also find it at wordpress.org.)

If you would like to turn smilies off on your WordPress site, you will need to go to Settings > Writing > Uncheck the box for smilies in the formatting section.

If smilies are not working on your site for some reason, then go to the section above and make sure the box for smilies is checked.

You can learn more about the default smilies that come with WordPress by going to the WP smiley information page. This page will explain such things as where the default smilies are located in your WordPress files if you would like to manually replace them with others. (If you do this, you will need to keep the file names and file types the same as the originals.)

Smiley Plugins

If you’d like to use custom smilies, aside from manually replacing the default WordPress smilies one by one, there are other options for you in the form of plugins. Here are a few.

Custom Smilies (Download Here)

This plugin puts a set of custom smilies within easy reach via an icon right beside the media uploader.

You also have the option to display certain smilies above the comment form by default or change the text associated with them.

Speedy Smilies (Download Here)

The Speedy Smilies plugin claims to make smilies load faster than the default WordPress smilies. And it also puts a box of available smilies on the post edit page for easy insertion.

It also offers a number of different sets of smilies.

Smilies Themer (Download Here)

The Smilies Themer plugin gives you a choice of a number of different smiley “theme” sets to choose from. You can easily preview the smilies before switching to them in place of the default WordPress smilies.

Yahoo Messenger Emoticons (Download Here)

This plugin does what you would expect—it gives you emoticons/smilies based on the Yahoo Messenger smilies. You also have the choice between large and small smilies.

(On thing to know about this plugin is that you will need to deactivate the default WordPress smilies: Settings > Writing > Uncheck the box for smilies in the formatting section.)

Photo: Smiley from BigStock