17 Best WordPress Plugins to Display and Highlight Code in Blog Posts

Updated on November 30th, 2012 by Quertime Team in WordPress

Which is the best plugin to display code in your WordPress posts? Although WordPress allows users to display code within a post, the result is not impressive. That’s the reason why there are so many great plugins out there to address this issue. If you happen to be a blogger and occasionally publish coding tutorials, then today’s post will definitely be useful to you. We’ve done extensive research and gathered 17 most-used WordPress plugins for displaying code snippet in blog posts.

Which is your favorite coding plugin? Tell us in the comments box below.
Note: Some plugins might not be compatible with the WYSIWYG editor.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved
SyntaxHighlighter Evolved allows you to easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without losing its formatting or making any manual changes.

WP-Syntax
WP-Syntax provides clean syntax highlighting using GeSHi, supporting a wide range of popular languages. It supports highlighting with or without line numbers and maintains formatting while copying snippets of code from the browser.

CodeColorer
CodeColorer is a syntax highlighting plugin which allows you to insert code snippets into blog posts. It supports color themes, code in RSS and comments.

Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress
This plugin makes using the Google Syntax highlighter by Alex Gorbatchev to highlight code snippets within WordPress simple. It is multiple languages support and very lightweight.

SyntaxHighlighter Plus
SyntaxHighlighter Plus is a WordPress plugin for code syntax highlighting. It allows you to easily post syntax highlighted code all without loosing its formatting.

Code Snippet
Code Snippet is WordPress plugin for displaying code with highlighting in blog posts using the GeSHi engine. A large number of languages are supported and it can be easily extended.

Crayon Syntax Highlighter
A Syntax Highlighter built in PHP and jQuery that supports customizable languages and themes. It can highlight from a URL, a local file or WordPress post text. Crayon makes it easy to manage Language files and define custom language elements with regular expressions.

Code Markup
Code Markup is another plugin that makes it easy to include program code samples in your posts. You can even include HTML markup in the code sample; Code Markup magically knows which characters should be displayed as code and which should be rendered as HTML.

Sniplets
Sniplets is a generic text insertion plugin with support for an extensible processing framework. You can dynamically replace text in your posts with text that may be defined elsewhere, or created by some other module. For example, you can use Sniplets to perform syntax highlighting of files, execute custom PHP code, insert data from a database.

WP-SynHighlight
WP-SynHighlight provides syntax highlighting for about 116 programming languages via Geshi. The plugin has many options to customize code highlighting.

Developer Formatter
Developer Formatter creates a better display of codes on your page or blog. The plugin do use of GeSHi highlight system, so you will have support for more than 110 languages, including PHP, ASP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Java, Python, Delphi, C++, C, Visual Basic and much more.

Preserve Code Formatting
Preserve formatting of code for display by preventing its modification by WordPress and other plugins while retaining original whitespace and characters.

FV Code Highlighter
This plugin supports the highlighting of CSS, (x)HTML, JavaScript, XML and PHP. The default tag-highlighter color scheme uses the same colors Adobe’s Dreamweaver is using. This makes it easy for your visitors to recognize what type of codes you wrote.

Highlight Source Pro
This plugin is powerful, XHTML-compliant, server-side code highlighting for pretty much all languages.

WP Advanced Code Editor
WP Advanced Code Editor integrates the EasyArea advanced code editor into WordPress. This adds real time syntax highlighting, line numbering, full screen editing, and more to the code editor in the “Add New Post” and “Add New Page” screens.

WP Chili
Easy code highlighting for WordPress with Chili. The plugin allows you to switch to the code tab and put your code snippet easily.

File Inliner
This plugin displays the content of a file in a post. The content of the file (called a “snippet”) is put in a “pre” block by default.