I'm using a filter to remove the <p> tags auto wrap, but there still wrapped elements?

Question

I have this in my functions.php:

The images inside the slider were added as custom post types called "Page Content." I'm not sure if the filter only applies to the main Posts.

/**
 * Remove paragraph tags around content and excerpt
 */
remove_filter( 'the_content', 'wpautop' );
remove_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'wpautop' );

The the posts in the admin look like this:

But something still wrapping the images of my Nivo Slider with p tags:

CSS:

#slider-wrapper {
    float: left;
    height: 560px;
}
#slider {
    float: left;
    border: 1px solid #DDD;
    position:relative;
    background:url(images/loading.gif) no-repeat 50% 50%;
}
#slider img {
    top: 0px;
    left: 0px;
    display: none;
    float: left;
    position: absolute;
    width: 958px;
    height: 458px;
}
.nivo-controlNav {
    margin: 490px auto 0;
    overflow: hidden;
}
.nivo-controlNav a {
    background: url(images/bullets.png) no-repeat;
    border: 0;
    float: left;
    text-indent: -9999px;
    width: 22px;
    height: 22px;
}
.nivo-controlNav a.active {
    background-position: 0 -22px;
}
.nivo-directionNav a {
    display: block;
    width: 70px;
    height: 70px;
    background: url(images/arrows.png) no-repeat;
    text-indent: -9999px;
    border: 0;
}
a.nivo-nextNav {
    background-position: -70px 0;
    right: -20px;
}
a.nivo-prevNav {
    left: -20px;
}
.nivo-caption {
    text-shadow:none;
    font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
}
.nivo-caption a {
    color:#efe9d1;
    text-decoration:underline;
}

Any suggestions to remove the p tags?

Answer 1

There are various functions aside from wpautop() that filter post content, such as force_balance_tags(), which was designed to balance bad HTML coming in via the editor.

They're mostly defined in formatting.php, where you can see the various code in source.

Removal of these filters can be as simple as one line, as you point out:

remove_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');

Answer 2

To summarize (since I just worked through this myself):

The problem does come from WP's automatic post-processing routines. They recognize a "loose" img as invalid HTML, and automatically wrap it in "p" tags. That's probably usually helpful, but I found that wrapping it in a "p", as opposed to a generic "div", it was forcing my images to inherit a lot of my style properties that I only wanted to apply to text.

Here's the Codex page that explains it: How WordPress Processes Post Content

There are basically three or four ways to address this, from what I can tell:

• You can suppress the auto-correction altogether, as @editor described above.
• If you're handy with plugins, you can edit or override the default substitution of "p" with "div". I'm not that concerned or ambitious, so I haven't dug into the details, but it doesn't look like it would be too difficult, if you know what you're doing.
• You can set up your CSS so that it assumes that at least some of your images will be wrapped in "p" tags.
• You can manually wrap all your images in redundant "div" or "p" tags.

Personally, I've opted for the last option -- just putting them into their own little divs.

Answer 3

If you want a simple solution that only unwraps the p tags around your images, give this plugin a look: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/unwrap-images/admin/

DISCLAIMER: I developed it for my own needs, but it works quite well.