[wp-hackers] Shortcodes and formatting

[Mark Jaquith]

On Apr 1, 2008, at 3:37 PM, Andy Skelton wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 2:33 PM, Mark Jaquith  
> <mark.wordpress at txfx.net> wrote:
>> How would we know which plugin adds which tag?  i.e. how do we
>> automatically queue up the deactivation hook to remove the tag?
>
> We don't. The plugin would have to call this on its own deactivation.

But then some plugins will clean up their shortcodes when they're  
gone, and others won't.

<!--[shortcode]--> would have been nice, because it is self-cleaning.   
But it's probably too late to change it.  So let's not cry over  
spilled milk.

Here's my idea:

We keep an array of added shortcodes in the options table:  
installed_shortcodes.  add_shortcode() will check this array, and  
update it as necessary (first time a shortcode plugin is run, for  
example).  But it will also keep an array of shortcodes in memory.

in do_shortcodes(), we compare the option with the in-memory list of  
shortcodes.  If a plugin is deactivated, it'll be in the  
"installed_shortcodes" option, but *not* in the in-memory array.  We  
can then easily strip out these shortcodes from the content.

Sidenote: we'd need to strip <p>\[$shortcode( .*?\]|\])</p> out, for  
shortcodes entered on their own line.

--
Mark Jaquith • http://markjaquith.com/