How to customize widget appearance

The appearance of widgets in the frontend depends on both CSS and HTML. This plugin does not insert any additional CSS to your website frontend, so if you need to customize the styling you'll have to do at theme level, or you have to insert explicitly insert in your widget using the Text / HTML mode (this option is not recommended though). As for the HTML, most of the markup is controlled by WordPress and by the theme. The HTML output of a widget includes the following parts: {before_widget} {before_title} {title} {after_title} {before_text} {text} {after_text} {after_widget}

by Black Studio 4.8 (191 reviews)

Black Studio TinyMCE Widget

Name: Black Studio TinyMCE Widget
Rating: 4.8 (191 reviews)
Author: Black Studio

The visual editor widget for WordPress.

Black Studio TinyMCE Widget ranks #234 among WordPress.org plugins with 200,000+ active installations, is #34 of 8,538 in the Customization category, a 4.8/5 rating from 191 reviews, and was last updated Aug 20, 2026. Data from WordPress.org, refreshed twice daily — see methodology.

Compatible with WP 7.1

v2.7.4 Current Version v2.7.4

Updated 3 weeks ago Last Update on 20 Aug, 2026

Refreshed 11 hours ago Last Refreshed on

#34 of 8,538 in Customization Top 1% by installs Downloads -35.7% this week Actively maintained

View on WordPress.org

Rank

#234

— No change

Active Installs

200K+

-24.8%

KW Avg Position

0.8 better

Downloads

11.1M

+868 today

Support Resolved

— No change

Rating

96%

Review 4.8 out of 5

4.8 (191 reviews)

Next Milestone 300K

Total Progress 64.6%

200K+ 300K+

Ranks to Climb

Growth Needed

8,000,000

Active Installs

Pro

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Rank Changes

Current #234

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Active Installs Growth

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Active Installs 0,000,000+

Growth +0.0%

Peak 0,000,000

Downloads Growth

Downloads

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Peak

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Reviews & Ratings

4.8

191 reviews

Overall 96%

173 (91%)

8 (4%)

2 (1%)

3 (2%)

5 (3%)

Security History

Source: WPVulnerability

No known vulnerabilities on record for Black Studio TinyMCE Widget. Checked 1 week ago.

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Plugin Details

Version: 2.7.4
Last Updated: Aug 20, 2026
Requires WP: 5.0+
Tested Up To: 7.1
PHP Version: 5.2 or higher
Author: Black Studio

Support & Rating

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.8
Reviews: 191
Support Threads: 0
Resolved: 0%

Keywords

editor tinyMCE visual widget wysiwyg

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TL;DR

AI summary of the plugin's readme

This plugin is for WordPress users and developers who want a rich text editor for widgets. It solves the problem of the default WordPress text widget lacking a WYSIWYG interface for adding formatted text and media without HTML knowledge.

TinyMCE visual editor for widgets
Switch between Visual and HTML mode
Insert images, videos, and media
Insert links to pages or posts
Shortcode and embed support
Block-based Widgets Editor support
Customizer live preview support
Multi-site compatibility

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Black Studio TinyMCE Widget

Since version 1.3.1 the name of the widget changed from Black Studio TinyMCE Widget to Visual Editor to enhance user-friendliness. Black Studio TinyMCE Widget is still the name of the plugin, but it was a bit too long and not very intuitive for inexperienced users. You may find references to the old name in articles and videos on the web, so don't panic if you don't see the Black Studio TinyMCE Widget in your available widgets, just look for Visual Editor. Note: if you are using WordPress in a language other than English you may have a corresponding name translated into your language. Widgets disappeared after migrating or changing the site URL When dealing with a WordPress site URL change it is necessary to face the serialized fields issue: data may become corrupted if using a simple search/replace (see the Codex for further info). This is not an issue specifically related to our plugin, but it affects all the parts (plugins, themes and WordPress core files too) that use serialized data archiving. When changing the site URL, the recommended way is to use the Search and Replace for WordPress Databases Script, as suggested by the Codex.

WPML is the leading commercial plugin for WordPress multi-language sites. If you're using WPML v3.8 or newer and you need to translate a widget, we recommend to create a separate widget for each language of your site and assign the language to each widget accordingly using the selector "Display on language" provided by WPML. This way you will be able to work with the visual editor also for translations. For older versions of WPML (up to 3.7.x), we recommend to install the 3rd party WPML Widgets plugin, which provides the same feature described above, that was not available natively on WPML. In the past, we also suggested to translate the widgets using the official WPML String Translation plugin, but this method is now deprecated as it was not very friendly due to the inability of using the visual editor for translations. If you were using WPML String Translation, we recommend to switch to the aforementioned translation method and remove the entries in WPML String Translation list after you moved them to be real widgets. Starting from version 2.6.0 of Black Studio TinyMCE Widget, a warning will be displayed if any deprecated translation is detected.

WordPress has a nice autoembed feature that allows you to embed videos and other stuff in an easy way, by just putting the URL in the content area. This is also possible for widgets created with this plugin. If you are using a version of WordPress prior to 4.0 or a version of Black Studio TinyMCE Widget prior to 2.0, for best results it is recommended to put the URL inside an [embed] shortcode. Example: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXXXXXXXXXX[/embed] Ensure that the URL has not a hyperlink. Alternatively, if you don't want to use [embed] shortcode, ensure that the URL is not surrounded by a <p> tag.

The appearance of widgets in the frontend depends on both CSS and HTML. This plugin does not insert any additional CSS to your website frontend, so if you need to customize the styling you'll have to do at theme level, or you have to insert explicitly insert <style> in your widget using the Text / HTML mode (this option is not recommended though). As for the HTML, most of the markup is controlled by WordPress and by the theme. The HTML output of a widget includes the following parts: {before_widget} {before_title} {title} {after_title} {before_text} {text} {after_text} {after_widget}

The {title} and {text} are the values that you insert in Widgets administration panel. The markup of {before_widget}, {after_widget}, {before_title}, {after_title} is usually defined by your theme when registering a sidebar with the register_sidebar function. The {before_text} and {after_text} are the only piece of HTML markup added by the plugin. The default markup is the same as native WordPress text widgets to ensure visual compatibility with styles created for text widgets: <div class="textwidget"> {text} </div>. You may customize the markup using the black_studio_tinymce_before_text and black_studio_tinymce_after_text filter hooks. They both take two parameters, the first is the default text and the second is the widget instance. See examples below. Example 1: Custom markup for {before_text} and {after_text} add_filter( 'black_studio_tinymce_before_text', 'my_widget_before_text', 10, 2 ); function my_widget_before_text( $before_text, $instance ) { return '<div class="mytextwidget">'; } add_filter( 'black_studio_tinymce_after_text', 'my_widget_after_text', 10, 2 ); function my_widget_after_text( $after_text, $instance ) { return '</div>'; } Example 2: Totally remove markup for [before_text] and [after_text] add_filter( 'black_studio_tinymce_before_text', '__return_empty_string' ); add_filter( 'black_studio_tinymce_after_text', '__return_empty_string' ); There's also an additional hook, that you may use to specify to not display widgets if their content is empty: add_filter( 'black_studio_tinymce_hide_empty', '__return_true' );

You may alter widget title and text via code using the widget_title and widget_text filter hooks (see Codex for details). The plugin also internally uses widget_text filter to apply specific features: icl_t (priority 2): applies WPML translation (called only if WPML is activated on the site). autoembed (priority 4): converts embed urls to relevant embed codes. convert_smilies (priority 6): converts text equivalent of smilies to images. wpautop (priority 8): applies paragraphs automatically (if the relevant option is selected).

If for any reason you need to remove the filters above, you may use the following code snippet (or a custom version of it): add_action( 'init', 'remove_bstw_widget_text_filters' ); function remove_bstw_widget_text_filters() { if ( function_exists( 'bstw' ) ) { remove_filter( 'widget_text', array( bstw()->compatibility()->plugins(), 'wpml_widget_text' ), 2 ); remove_filter( 'widget_text', array( bstw()->text_filters(), 'autoembed' ), 4 ); remove_filter( 'widget_text', array( bstw()->text_filters(), 'convert_smilies' ), 6 ); remove_filter( 'widget_text', array( bstw()->text_filters(), 'wpautop' ), 8 ); remove_filter( 'widget_text', array( bstw()->text_filters(), 'do_shortcode' ), 10 ); } } Plugin's data storage and cleanup The widgets data are stored in serialized format inside a record in the wp_options table having option_name = 'widget_black-studio-tinymce'. Widget data storage is handled by WordPress and not directly by the plugin. The widgets data are intentionally kept in the database upon plugin deactivation/deletion to avoid content loss. Additionally, the plugin may save some user preferences in the wp_usermeta table, in particular, the records having s key with the prefix _bstw. If you want to totally remove the plugin including its data, just uninstall it and then remove the above records from the database. You may use the following SQL queries for removal (Note: adjust table prefix according to your database settings): DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'widget_black-studio-tinymce'; DELETE FROM wp_usermeta WHERE meta_key LIKE '_bstw%';