There’s a nice feature in WordPress for including source code in your blog posts, but the Codex is not crystal-clear on how to activate it.

According to this article, for example, all you have to do is to insert a shortcode tag and anything that goes inside that tag will be automatically formatted.

But when I tried that on some Java code that I recently posted, it did not work. Only after some long work did I understand that in order to enable this nice feature you must install either the SyntaxHighlighter or the SyntaxHighlighter Plus plugin. They both provide this shortcode, but SyntaxHighlighter Plus seems more advanced. That’s the one I installed, and now it works perfectly:

<some>
  <xml>
    that is now nicely formatted
    and highlighted!
  </xml>
</some>