Occasionally, I’ll run into a situation where I need to call a post specifically using the get_post() function.  get_post() returns a Post object, with a number of member variables – the one that stores the actual content of the post being post_content.

However, if you try just echoing $post->post_content, you’ll get completely unformatted text – which is frustrating, because WordPress uses a great visual text editor on the backend – it’s a shame to not take advantage of it.  Fortunately, WordPress provides a filter to display the text just as it would be displayed in the the_content() function inside the loop.  Here’s how it works:

To get the content formatted properly, we need to apply a filter (which is different from adding a filter – here, we’re registering it so that other filter functions can modify it before it’s displayed).

apply_filters('the_content', $post->post_content);

So, we’re just applying the the_content filter to the $post->post_content variable.  Doing so means that any plugin which adds a filter function to the_content like this:

add_filter('the_content', 'my_content_manipulator');

function my_content_manipulator($content){

//do stuff here

return $content;

}

will be applied to your variable.  Fortunately, it also means that the WordPress core functions which format the post content correctly can also work on it.