{"id":3937,"date":"2026-09-26T02:43:45","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T02:43:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quicknewsnigeria.com\/?p=3937"},"modified":"2026-09-26T02:43:45","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T02:43:45","slug":"dennis-snell-enter-the-mess-shortcodes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quicknewsnigeria.com\/?p=3937","title":{"rendered":"Dennis Snell: Enter the mess: Shortcodes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tonight I started working on some Shortcode processing in WordPress. This is an historically nasty problem because the Shortcode syntax and parsing is wildly dynamic.<\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Shortcode syntax is only technically recognized for shortcodes registered at the time of parsing. This means that there is not a general Shortcode grammar.<\/li>\n<li>Whether a shortcode has \u201ccontent,\u201d meaning whether it expects a closing tag, depends on whether the closing tag <em>exists<\/em> in the post.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is a problem that has plagued me for years and I have generally just ignored. There\u2019s an open Core issue in Trac for changing some shortcode parsing (<a href=\"https:\/\/core.trac.wordpress.org\/ticket\/50683\">#50683<\/a>), and I have thought a lot about it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I think there is more to explore, and more to gain. Maybe this goes nowhere, but keep your eyes open for it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight I started working on some Shortcode processing in WordPress. This is an historically nasty<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicknewsnigeria.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicknewsnigeria.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicknewsnigeria.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicknewsnigeria.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicknewsnigeria.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quicknewsnigeria.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3937\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicknewsnigeria.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicknewsnigeria.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicknewsnigeria.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}