What is WordPress Shortcode?

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WordPress shortcodes are brilliant. They give you so much flexibility in the manner you deliver content, and their use will simplify use of integrated functions for the less tech-savvy. In a sense, they are an alternative to allowing PHP execution delivering dynamic content within a post. You can create simple functions that will easily deliver content within a post or parse text in a certain manner with the use of simple pre-defined code.

Basically, some code (shortcode) within your post is recognised by WordPress and converted into other more useful content as defined by a function designed to accomplish a particular task.

This video from WordPress shows how easy it it to insert a YouTube (and other) videos into your WordPress.com post using shortcode rather than using the provided embed code. Think of it as kind of “BBcode“. Shortcode = shortcut.

Here’s the simple “Hello, World” example that WordPress uses on its website to describe the basic principles of shortcode use.

function hello() {  
return 'Hello, World!';  
}
add_shortcode('hw', 'hello');

If you posted this code into your functions.php file, or in the case of Thesis, your custom_functions.php file, including the shortcode of [hw] into the html component of your WordPress editor (into a saved post) would output “Hello, World” in its place.

Read about shortcode here and here on the WordPress website.

We’ll post examples of its use soon.

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If you liked this article, you may also like:

1. Website Snapshots with WordPress Shortcode
2. Convert Currency on your Website or in a WordPress Post (with Shortcode)
3. [Shortcode] Include an RSS feed in a post or page with shortcode
4. Add shortcode into a WordPress sidebar
5. [Shortcode] examples [3] – Text Boxes