Why WordPress Shortcodes Blow Me Away!

Jun 17, 2011 Posted by Judith in Musings, WordPress Tips

If you have a WordPress site, you’ve probably been hearing allot lately about shortcodes or even noticing more buttons in your post editor or theme and plugin documentation. Shortcodes are basically little snippets of text in brackets that tell WordPress to do certain things when that shortcode is present within a page or post.

One shortcode that most are familiar with is [gallery]. This shortcode is what WordPress inserts into a post when you use the Insert Gallery function to display a bunch of photos that you just uploaded in to WordPress on a page or post.

Introduced in WordPress 2.5 is the Shortcode API, a simple set of functions for creating macro codes for use in post content. It enables plugin and theme developers to create special kinds of content (e.g. forms, content generators) that users can attach to certain pages by adding the corresponding shortcode into the page text.

Like the neato shadow box? That is accomplished with a shortcode for my theme!

Another example of a shortcode is with the contact form plugin I use on this site, ContactForm 7. Once I set up your my Project Inquiry form to my liking in the plugin’s control panel, I simply inserted the provided shortcode [contact-form 3 “ProjectContact”] on my Project Inquiry page and wallah! The form displays just the way I set it up.

I know I am dating myself, but back in the day, this form would have required minimally HTML coding and a server side CGI script that had to be configured as well! That’s what blows me away! Now with just a couple brackets and characters, anyone can add formatting to their site that would have been otherwise unavailable to non-developer types.

So you can see how easy shortcodes can make your life easier and your site cooler looking, right? Now, increasingly theme developers are using the WordPress Shortcode API to offer shortcodes that make formatting their themes to your liking much easier.

A great example of this is one of my favorite WordPress theme shops, Elegant Themes. ET offers an entire collection of formatting shortcodes that they integrate into their themes including:

Buttons
Content Boxes
Toggled Content
Tabbed Content
Slideshow
Image Slider
Easy Tooltips
Social Media
Quotes

Password Protect Your Content
Author Info
Column Layouts
Custom Icon Lists (using that shortcode here to get the green checkmarks)
Corporate Pricing Tables
Testimonials
DropCaps
Quotes

Yep — the above green checkmarks courtesy of a shortcode!

Shortcode use and integration vary by theme, by developer and by plugin so when looking at new themes, look for the menu tab “Shortcodes” in the theme’s demo to see what shortcodes will be available for your use.

Check out some WordPress Premium themes that use shortcodes — you will be blown away too!

At your service,
Judith
Your WordPress Consultant