“Safe” HTML and WordPress

• TinyMCE Valid Elements Plugin, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-valid-elements/
  I tried this first, it should have allowed me to add specific HTML elements and attributes to allow all users to be able to insert and edit without stripping these elements. Unfortunately I never got it to work (I tried clearing my browser cache, interpreting the plugin’s instructions to do a Ctrl-F5 in my browser, um I use a Mac and I don’t have a Control key that I use that way!). One thing I did notice, if I entered an element/attribute that already existed I was unable to remove it from the plugin settings.
• Hand edit the include/kses.php file
  While I could do this to enter the tags I wanted to support, ultimately this didn’t seem to be a great long term solution. I’d have to remember to make the edits every time I upgraded WordPress
• The TinyMCE/WordPress documentation seemed to indicate there was a way of setting up CUSTOM_TAGs, but I couldn’t find any good instructions on how to do this, and once again I would need to keep forward migrating this file/configuration.
• A number of folks have plugins to work around the “embed” problem, by creating a custom variable and calling that variable from the plugin. This didn’t make a lot of sense to me either, it would require too much acrobatics on the part of the users.
• Unfiltered MU, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/unfiltered-mu/
  I finally settled on this plugin, it grants to Editors the same unfiltered access I have as an administrator. This isn’t completely perfect either, but the way I see running the sites we’d maintain here, I anticipate giving OEIT users the role of “editor” to manage the content of the sites. And I’d reserve the “administrator” role for site maintenance. We’ll see how it goes.

In any event, it took me way to long to figure out how to fix the problem–I remember coming across this same problem last year about this time, but unfortunately I don’t remember the “fix” we used then.