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Jan25

What Shortcodes Does WordPress Need?

by John Kolbert | Posted in: Site News



The release of WordPress 2.5 introduced shortcodes to the WordPress community. What are shortcodes? To quote a WordPress.com support page:

A shortcode is a WordPress-specific code that lets you do nifty things with very little effort. Shortcodes can embed files or create objects that would normally require lots of complicated, ugly code in just one line.

Source: http://faq.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/what-are-the-wordpress-shortcodes/

For example, in my Smart Ads plugin entering [smartads] inserts an advertisement into the post at that location. Or my RSSless plugin removes text surrounded by the [rssless] ... [/rssless] tags from your RSS feed.

I’m working on a plugin that will add a number of shortcodes to WordPress. I’d like these to be advanced shortcodes that add some significant functionality. I’ve got three shortcodes completed (I’m going to hold off disclosing what they do for now), but I’m looking for some more suggestions. What shortcodes would you like added to WordPress? Leave your ideas in the comments. For a list of existing shortcodes you can read this article.

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4 Comments

  1. WPCult said:

    Can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but I will definitely keep it in mind.

    on January 25, 2009 at 8:58 pm Reply

    • John Kolbert said:

      I’d appreciate that. Thanks for the re-tweet also!

      on January 26, 2009 at 10:26 pm

  2. Andrew said:

    It may already be there, but a short code for the blog URL, so internal links and image links can be entered and there won’t be a problem if the blog URL changes in future.

    I have a plugin that inserts the photo data. I think this should be default simply because WordPress captures the data but provides no way to output it.

    on January 26, 2009 at 6:58 am Reply

    • John Kolbert said:

      Hmm, interesting idea. Make defined template tags available via shortcodes? Sounds very intriguing. Thanks for the idea!

      on January 26, 2009 at 10:28 pm


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