WordPress 2.6 added a new “captions” feature that allows you to place text below images in a blog post. This feature is helpful for some, but others may wonder how WordPress captions can be disabled.
Some people, like myself, can be a little obsessive about their site’s markup — this author skips the WYSIWYG editor and writes all Of Zen and Computing articles in straight XHTML. As such, I noticed the bbcode-esque [caption…][/caption] tags in my blog posts and quickly disabled the feature.
Don’t use the CAPTIONS_OFF constant
You may find some sites recommending that you add define('CAPTIONS_OFF', 1); or define('CAPTIONS_OFF', true); to your wp-config.php file. Do not use this method — it is a temporary fix, and will not work with versions of WordPress after 2.6.1.
Do use functions.php
Turning off WordPress captions requires you place a little bit of code in your theme’s functions.php file. Look for this file in /wp-content/themes/your-theme-directory. If it is not there, create an empty functions.php file and save it in that location.
WordPress forum moderator Otto42 posted the code for disabling WordPress captions. Just add the following to functions.php:
<?php
add_filter('disable_captions', create_function('$a','return true;'));
?>
