At my recent WordPress Developer Meetup, the topic of shortcodes came up as a point of discusion. When talking about it, I realized that I’ve never actually talked about them here on the blog, so I thought it might be worth bringing up for discussion.

For those of you who have seen any of my plugins, you see that none of them include shortcodes despite the fact that people have requested functionality offered by them.

For the most part, I dislike WordPress shortcodes. I think they are unintuitive, difficult to use for the average user, and go against much of what the core functionality of WordPress aims to offer.

But the challenge is that there’s not yet a suitable alternative.

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With the exception of Standard and contract projects, I generally don’t build WordPress themes for release.

I tend to favor plugins because I’m attracted to the functionality that they are able to introduce to the core WordPress application and, frankly, I don’t have the design chops required to produce a theme of high enough quality.

Simply put, I try to focus on what I’m good at doing so others can do the same.

Last week, I talked about the problem of offering support for free WordPress plugins, the challenges that I’m currently facing, and ultimately what I’m aiming to do about it.

So in keeping consistent with trying to share my general thought process on both plugin development and moving to a better business model, I thought I’d also share some thoughts on building WordPress plugins. Continue reading