Moderator
Jan Dembowski
(@jdembowski)
Forum Moderator and Brute Squad
With hundreds+ of themes in use and each with their own shortcodes that do exactly the same thing.
Which really illustrates that those themes are Doing It All Wrong™. 😉
A theme is responsible for presentation and layout. While you could insert functionality like that into a theme, that really doesn’t belong there. Give this article a read as it explains it better than I could.
http://wptavern.com/why-wordpress-theme-developers-are-moving-functionality-into-plugins
As to a short code standard, do you mean an approved and vetted list of short codes? If so how would that work or even be managed?
Like this: http://codex.wordpress.org/Shortcode
The point is that I know html, css and javascript. It just does not make sense to me that every site I work on should try to reinvent html in its own awful way and I have to remember them all or refer to inadequate documentations.
The pat reply of: hand it off to theme or plugin developers does not cut it with me. Good core design is what is required. This is done with many things and the result is a mess. (user roles and permissions anyone?)
So what if someone’s plugin business is destroyed by putting in the core what should have been there from the start? Too frickin bad.
It has just got to the point that many themes have a set of shortcodes nearly as complicated as html, poorly designed and inadequately documented. Why not just use html? (because wordpress insists on mangling it)
So I still think that a standard set of shortcodes would be useful, a way to use html without wordpress mangling it.
It sounds silly but why not a [div] shortcode, a [script] shortcode, a [css] shortcode… if we are going to re-invent html then it should at least make sense and have standards.
The pat reply of: hand it off to theme or plugin developers does not cut it with me.
I am sorry that you are not happy with this answer but the fact remains that every theme & plugin is different. Themes on wordpress.org do not contain their own custom shortcodes, so perhaps you could be a little more specific as to which theme or plugin you are having a problem with.
So I still think that a standard set of shortcodes would be useful, a way to use html without wordpress mangling it.
As someone who has created a few plugins, I can tell you now that this is completely unrealistic. There cannot be a “standard set of shortcodes” in exactly the same way that there cannot be a standard set of plugins.
It sounds silly but why not a [div] shortcode, a [script] shortcode, a [css] shortcode
Because that would not suit every plugin situation. Every plugin is different, so every shortcode is different. That’s why there is a Shortcode API.
So then. Tell me how html standards do not work. It is the very same thing.
No it isn’t. HTML standards are quite different. That would be like comparing oranges with bananas.
