Things That Matter Most

Things That Matter Most

WordPress Core Proposal: Shortcode Tracking

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Continuing on with my previous goal, I want to pitch another WordPress core idea – but this time one that would be best suited as a patch rather than a plugin.

Current Limitations

At the moment, there is no way to query posts in WordPress based on the condition of having or not having a shortcode.  There’s no way to grab all posts with galleries.  All posts with embedded audio/video.  All posts with legacy shortcodes in need of an upgrade.

Well, you can create a new WP_Query instance and pass part of the shortcode in as a search parameter.  You can create a custom SQL query to match against the content of posts.

Both of these solutions are hacks; non-performant hacks at that! 1

Proposed Alternative

I ran head-first into this issue last week when I needed to query the database for all posts containing a gallery tag.  The solution turned out to be a hook on WordPress’ save action that flags the post as having or not having a gallery in a hidden “flags” taxonomy.

My proposal – make this part of WordPress core.

Every shortcode tag would become a term in a “shortcode” taxonomy.  On save, posts will be automatically tagged with whatever shortcodes their content happens to contain.  Queries then become simple:

$galleries = new WP_Query(
    array(
        'post_type' => 'post',
        'tax_query' => array(
            array(
                'taxonomy' => 'shortcode',
                'field'    => 'slug',
                'terms'    => array( 'gallery' ),
                'operator' => 'IN',
            ).
        ),
    )
);

Does it Make Sense for Core?

The first argument against this change would be “this sounds like plugin material.”  On one hand, I agree.  Building a flags taxonomy for your theme or plugin to keep track of shortcodes in use is, ultimately, a simple endeavor.  Actually, I’ve already written the code for it.

The argument to have this functionality in core, however, is a simple one: Standardization.  By having this code in core by default, all shortcodes will be tracked whether they’re in core, in a plugin, or in the theme.  Plugins and themes can then query against a standard taxonomy to find shortcodes in use.

Ultimately, it’s an argument for interoperability between shortcodes among plugin and theme developers.  Does this argument mean it makes sense for core?  I say yes. What do you think?

Notes:

  1. Querying against post content means matching against an unindexed, unbound, longtext field.  This is a heavy query, and running it during routine blog operations is a horrible, terrible, no-good, really bad idea. ↩

Theme-ready Shortcodes in WordPress

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A few months back, I taught you how to make your widgets theme-ready by extracting the actual markup into an overridable template.  Now, we’re going to do the same for shortcodes.

And for those of you wanting to see this in practice, stay tuned for the release of version 2.5 of WP Publication Archive in a few weeks.  I’m using this technique to make markup easy to change. [Read more…]