Fight the Madness - A WordPress Shortcodes Revolution

Fight the [/Madness] – A Shortcode Revolution!

Published

March 29, 2013

13 Comments

As a general rule, I hate WordPress shortcodes. I understand their value to the end-user and have even enjoyed developing them on some recent projects; however, they’ve become a sort of mutated flu vaccine.

Created for good, they have now become a disgusting virus mimicking basic HTML and infiltrating areas they do not belong – themes.

I cringe every time I see a theme that boasts “100’s of shortcodes” or, God forbid, uses [h1][/h1] as a replacement for traditional HTML headings.

But how do we make everyone happy? How do we satisfy the developers that need their themes to be competitive in marketplaces?

How do we satisfy end-users that want to abuse shortcodes without having hundreds of pages or thousands of posts break when switching themes? How do we make shortcodes future-proof?

The answer? A Plugin! I have seen a very pleasant trend within the ThemeForest marketplace of developers creating plugins – ZillaShortcodes or Symple Shortcodes – to house the shortcode functionalities for their themes. Love that approach; however, I would like to take this one step further.

A Vision For The Mad Revolution

I have a dream, theme developers and end-users can live in shortcode harmony with the use of a single plugin. This plugin would contain hundreds – nay, thousands – of shortcodes! Every possible shortcode an end-user could demand!

For Developers

To integrate shortcodes into themes using this plugin, a theme developer would only have to:

require the plugin
add support for the shortcodes they desired
style their outputs.

[php]

// Check to see if the plugin is installed. If it is, adds support for the desired shortcodes. If not, it prompts the user to download from repository

if ( function_exists( ‘plugin_specific_function’ ) ) {

add_shortcodes_to_theme(‘toggles’, ‘columns’, ‘buttons’, ‘dialog box that jumps in from the top-right corner and exits through your screen, that’s right, through your screen’)

} else {

add_thickbox(); // Required for the plugin install dialog.

function plugin_install_notice() { ?>

<p><?php _e("This theme uses a shortcode plugin to generate shortcodes.", ‘cudathemes’); ?><a href="<?php echo admin_url(‘plugin-install.php?tab=plugin-information&plugin=our-cool-plugin&TB_iframe=true&width=640&height=517’); ?>" class="thickbox onclick"><?php _e("Install Now", ‘cudathemes’); ?></a></p>;

</div>

<?php

}

add_action(‘admin_notices’, ‘plugin_install_notice’);

}

[/php]

For End-Users

When an end-user activates their theme and downloads the plugin, the shortcodes defined by the developer will be accessible within a shortcode generator.

Future-Proofing

When switching themes, what if the developer of the new theme doesn’t add support for a shortcode that has been previously used?

Easy! Have an admin settings page that lets the user manually activate any of the shortcodes available within the plugin. This would allow the functionality to be output with very generic styling that can be overridden with style changes to the new child theme.

Thoughts?

Like the title suggests, this is just my “mad” solution for something I see as an annoying problem. I would love to hear some different ideas or ways others are working with the shortcodes madness.

There are 13 comments

March 29, 2013 #

John

I don’t know that you’ve solved the complexity for the user by having themes add support for specific shortcodes and then having the user have to turn on others. Not to toot my own horn, but I’ve written a plugin that, I think, approaches the problem pretty well.

Look for a specific css file in the stylesheet dir. If not found, look in the template dir, and if not found there, load the basic stylesheet that ships with the plugin. For theme authors that want to combine those styles into their main stylesheet, I have a filter in place the dev can simply add to their functions file and prevent that check from firing at all.

To me that’s a better solution because if the user switches themes they still get basic styling in place for all the shortcodes while allowing for theme devs to supply their own customizations for use with their themes.
- March 29, 2013 #
  
  Chip Bennett
  
  Yeah, I don’t understand the need for Themes to register support for a given shortcode. I think that’s a completely unnecessary step.
  
  The whole idea of moving shortcodes into a Plugin is to ensure that their output is Theme-agnostic.
  
  If a Theme wants to provide tighter integration with a given shortcode, just define styles for it in the Theme stylesheet. No functional integration required.
  
  And Themes should absolutely not be requiring a shortcode Plugin. That’s just bad user experience.
  - March 29, 2013 #
    
    Josh Mallard
    
    Good point on not requiring the plugin.
    
    What are your thoughts on adding an admin page that lists the theme’s suggested plugins and having a notice for this page that the user is able to hide? Would be a lot less intrusive that way.
    - March 29, 2013 #
      
      Chip Bennett
      
      What are your thoughts on adding an admin page that lists the theme’s suggested plugins and having a notice for this page that the user is able to hide?
      
      Themes offering an enhanced experience via integrated support for Plugins is always encouraged. I don’t know if “suggested Plugins” needs to be blared via admin pages or notices, or if listing them in the Theme documentation is sufficient. (The Contextual Help API is pretty slick and powerful, and would be a perfect place for such documentation. Take a look at Oenology if you want to see a fully fleshed-out example.)
- March 29, 2013 #
  
  Josh Mallard
  
  The main reason I added the theme developer defining the shortcodes was for the shortcode generator. Without that, the user would be bombarded with thousands of shortcodes that the theme doesn’t provide styling for.
  - March 29, 2013 #
    
    Chip Bennett
    
    The Plugin should be providing the basic styling for shortcodes that require it – such as columns, etc.
  - March 29, 2013 #
    
    John
    
    I get where you’re coming from, but if a theme developer would like to offer tighter styling integration with some shortcodes, then copy the base stylesheet for all shortcodes, modify the parts they want to modify and leave the rest alone. Doesn’t that solve the issue right there?
    - March 29, 2013 #
      
      Chip Bennett
      
      There are many potential ways to skin that cat.
      
      Assuming that the shortcode Plugin properly enqueues its stylesheet, two such methods:
      
      1) The Theme can late-enqueue a stylesheet that overrides some Plugin style definitions
      
      2) The Theme can dequeue the Plugin stylesheet, and enqueue its own stylesheet, thereby overriding all shortcode styles in their entirety
      - March 29, 2013 #
        
        John
        
        Oh absolutely. I had it in my mind that this super plugin was taking an approach similar to what I noted in my initial comment.
      - March 30, 2013 #
        
        Josh Mallard
        
        #1 is the closest to what I envisioned. Seems like #2 would require the theme developer to do A LOT of extra work.
        
        The plugin would have all the functional styles. The theme developer would only be adding styles that made the shortcodes visually consistent with the theme’s design.
March 29, 2013 #

Manny Fleurmonf

shortcodes are good when they simplify complex html or used for embedding some content ie. videos, galleries, etc. Still hate them when they ARE the gallery, though.
March 29, 2013 #

Nur Ahmad Furlong

I agree, something has to give, the shortcode mahem has to stop and I think the idea of centralising the base of them is good. The creation of a plugin that provides a means for the most widely used shortcodes to be auto registered and then just feed off the theme’s custom styles or use plugin default styles is good.

I think the same applies to theme options to a large extent as well, so many themes have the exact same set of options with a few different ones here or there. And then switching themes one has to reset everything from scratch.

WordPress have started trying to address this in a slightly different way with the customiser but still it’s a problem which could do with some community collaboration to resolve and would make the lives of developers and users a whole lot easier.
April 2, 2013 #

V

This is truly a great idea, and a few of the plugins out there appear to be trying to achieve this, but the kind of single, centralized effort described here just won’t happen without WordPress endorsement, and even then there are plugin clones popping up every day by authors who need them for their own reasons, don’t understand how to properly fork a project, and so on.

The shortcode madness needs to be quelled with education first – the community could use a better understanding of what they are for and how they differ from Editor Styles. As Manny pointed out, shortcodes should be used to pull functionality into content that can’t otherwise be there due to the markup complexity – sliders, animations, accordions, etc. Anything that is strictly powered by HTML and CSS should be turned into an Editor Style where it can much easier be edited, previewed and customized for any theme. If anything, WordPress just needs to provide an inherent shortcode setup with the tinymce button that devs can hook into and customize the way they have provided the editor style option, to allow some coding consistency across the board.