WordPress Adopts Emoji, World Erupts In Applause

• April 29, 2015
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The world of WordPress has been in somewhat of a shambles as of late due to the discovery of not one but multiple dire vulnerabilities within the CMS’ framework itself as well as buried deep in some of the most popular plugins the market has to offer.

It only seems appropriate, then, that we begin to see the light at the other side of the deep, dark hacker’s tunnel with some good news: WordPress is now allowing the community to use emoji. Everywhere. Even within the URL of an individual post.

While this news may seem frivolous due to the inherently silly and fun nature of emoji, it carries some serious weight.

Not only are posts and comments more widely appreciated as a whole with a bit of visual stimulus but click rates are nearly doubled when any sort of image is present within a post. While emoji are small, they are descriptive; they serve as the world’s source of communication, impervious to the boundaries of language and dialect that we tackle every day on the net.

The new function accompanies WordPress 4.2, released last week. The only flaw we see here is that, if your site reader has not updated their own WordPress version, they’ll fail to see any emoji you include in a post and may instead see a distracting icon that could detract from the meaning or message of your post.

As Becca of ShinyShiny.TV writes oh so eloquently,

Until now, past versions of WordPress wouldn’t really support emoji. They’d display all strangely or just cause WordPress to have a mini freak out and not even save your posts. Now they’re getting on much better, so expect to see even more emoji all over the web. Great news for fans of smiling poops, pretty devastating news for emoji-haters.

A solid point. There are, after all, two kinds of people in this world.

That being said, it’s probably the best idea to start slow with the inclusion of your emoji; don’t go emoji-crazy before anyone has had the opportunity to update. Sneak them into posts here and updates there, and if you’re seeing a positive response then feel free to go all-out.