Comments on: Shortcode Shortcomings

By: Hackadelic

Hackadelic — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 15:52:11 +0000

Travis, you are right about TinyMCE. The problem is indeed related to wpauotp and shortcode_unautop. Alas, simply turning them off is not the solution.

But fortunately, I’ve just found a workable fix for that.

At least so far, it seems to fix things the way I want.

By: Travis

Travis — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:22:53 +0000

I recently had the same issue on a WordPress site I’ve built. The problem for me was that I was using a plug-in to disable the “wpautop” auto-formatting of content, but this plug-in was not disabling the “shortcode_unautop” filter as well, causing WordPress to “eat” paragraph tags in the content as you described.

The plug-in I am using is called “ps_disable_auto_formatting”: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ps-disable-auto-formatting/

I fixed it by adding: remove_filter(‘the_content’, ‘shortcode_unautop’); after line 72 of the main plug-in file.

This kind person has a post about it here, for a different plug-in “wp_unformatted”: http://spielwiese.fontein.de/2010/09/27/a-non-wordpress-bug/

Perhaps this is related? It certainly worked for me, and it might explain why the WordPress guys got a bit annoyed, since this bug doesn’t seem to be their fault.

TinyMCE has nothing to do with this particular bug, and I find it to be a pretty solid wysiwyg editor, given what it has to actually do. I’d also comment that the very reason I use “ps_disable_auto_formatting” is that I find it makes TinyMCE work the way it was intended, as wpautop seems to completely destroy paragraph tags as you edit content in the editor which is very annoying.

Good luck!

By: Andre

Andre — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 05:29:49 +0000

First, I know this is an older post but I still had to comment…exactly the issues I have experienced with the WP editor and shortcodes…and it seems to be ongoing and the WP development team just won’t listen (in fact one got quite upset with me when I mentioned they needed to get a quality editor). Long story short, shortcodes are a great idea for WP users but at the same time, it’s extremely buggy for typical users who have to work with the editor WP has. I’ve never been a fan of tinymce which is ultimately a nasty nasty editor and it’s what many others are based on. It changes my code, it doesn’t play well with shortcodes, and too proprietary. The irony here is that I use Joomla as well and the editor I use is the JCE editor which is based on the tinymce, but the development team there is top notch with this one.

By: Hackadelic

Hackadelic — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 09:20:58 +0000

Hi Dave,

it is not mine to improve the shortcode handling in WordPress. It is in the hands of the WordPress team.

One thing that I’ve discovered since is that it is probably not the API, or not the API alone. Much of it is “courtesy” of WP’s TinyMCE integration.

By: Dave Doolin

Dave Doolin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:37:05 +0000

Any progress made on this issue. This is my first stop because you were first up in Google… I may find out more as I dig deeper…

By: Ray

Ray — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:46:07 +0000

The shortcode API is a big problem with WordPress.

I know there are content creators who use the Visual Editor to input their content and shortcodes.

When they do this, paragraph tags wrap around the shortcode and gets rendered when they publish their article.

This, of course, does not validate the HTML!

This is something WordPress has to address!

By: Hackadelic

Hackadelic — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 02:59:55 +0000

Ray, you are so damn right. Shortcodes could be so usefull for assembling macro-content from micro-content, if it wasn’t for the crappy API implementation.

The “paragraph wrapping” thing (and other ) occurs even in the HTML editor – AFAICT it is due to built-in WordPress filters that are triggered before editor content is saved to the database, and after it is read from the database. I’m experimenting with another (not yet published) shortcode right now, and it blows my mind that when the shortcode returns something wrapped in a block element (like a div), WordPress prepends a

tag without closing it, which my browser interprets as a

(but other browsers have other interpretations).

I sure hope WP improves on this dramatically.