The DropCap plugin comes from an observation by David Ogilvy - a highly respected direct response marketer. He observed that he got a 13% increase in people reading his sales copy if the first letter in the first paragraph was a large drop capital.

This plugin makes implementing that literally two mouse clicks. You double-click the first word to highlight it, and then you click on the DropCap button on the toolbar. The plugin’s code selects out the first letter of the hightlighted word, and applies the DropCap CSS to provide the effect you see at the start of this post.

So how is this affected by the upgrade to WP 2.5?

Well - you need a toolbar  button to click on for the dropcap functionality to work.

The problem with the this upgrade is that the tinyMCE visual editor was upgraded. Well - it’s not really a problem - in that this new version of the visual editor is much better than the previous editor. However, the manner in which you add custom toolbar buttons has changed.

Up till WP 2.5, I had been using a modified version of the Buttonsnap class that had originally been developed by Owen Winkler. When Owen decided to no longer support the class (I think it was with the upgrade to WP2.1), I fixed the class, and this fix worked up till the introduction of WordPress 2.5.

What I had to do to overcome this was to learn how to write a tinyMCE Vsn 3 plugin.

Fortunately there are a couple of examples in the documenation - so getting the DropCap button to appear and work was not too difficult a mission to accomplish. So once again, we have the simple process of adding a dropcap in both the Visual, as well as the HTML editors :