Any plans to include shortcodes?

[Andrew Blackwood]

Hey Bill,

Thank you for developing such a professional and easy to understand theme. Working with Agency has been a breeze, and having you there for support makes it all that much easier. We’re really happy to have chosen Elegant themes for our site redesign, and appreciate all the hard work you put in AFTER we decided to go with Agency. You can see what we’ve done with your creativity here: http://www.nysf.com/w/ (Still looking for a nice texture that fits our org)

I know how important it is for developers to launch new themes, especially if they aren’t following the subscription model, but I wondered if I could press you for another improvement on Agency? Shortcodes can make web development so much easier for non-technical users and it would be really great to see them integrated into your themes some day.

I know that shortcodes can be extremely advanced, complicated things to code, but if you had a few, select options they could be an incredible asset, especially to small non-profits. In particular, I would love to see a few column options and maybe a pricing table rolled out. Pricing tables can be crucial in guiding potential donors, and while some plugins exist, one that matches the theme of Agency would be phenomenal. Column shortcode options are also very handy, as they let non-techinical users develop compelling websites quickly.

Do you have any plans to include shortcodes in future releases, or in upgrades to current themes? We’d love to include a well designed pricing table in our donor area, and columns could make everybody’s lives easier.

Once again thanks for your hard work!

[Bill Robbins]

Andrew,

I’m glad you’ve been able to make use of our Agency theme. Hopefully it will serve you guys well.

I do like shortcodes in some situations. I just wrote a quick plugin for a customer who wanted a shortcode to display all the menu items (food menu) that were in a particular group on a page in our Foxy theme. He wanted to be able to include multiple lists on one page. Shortcodes are a great way to go about helping with that.

In terms of adding additional styles like columns, tabbed sections and so on, I really believe those are best reserved for a plugin. The reason being, if they are part of your theme and you switch themes, you’re left with lots of small shortcode bits here and there. You could manually remove them, but if you’ve made extensive use of those, it could be quite a bit of work. If those shortcodes are added by a plugin, then you can change themes and you’ll still have those styles.

There’s actually a free plugin in at WordPress.org that creates a wide variety of useful shortcodes for things like buttons, columns and so on. I haven’t tried personally, but it’s well rated and looks promising.

Another option that I’ve been experimenting with lately is adding optional styles to the visual editor. That way you add the HTML that’s generated by the shortcode without having the actual shortcode present in your content.

The only downside there is the visual editor sometimes gets confused when you add and remove styles. Sometimes bits remain that cause problems.

Thank you so much for your suggestions and your business. I really do like to hear from my customers regarding their experiences so I can improve our themes to better serve everyone.

If I can do anything for you, just let me know,
Bill

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