THE PENDING DRAFT

Pressgr.am

March 17, 2013

Pressgram Logo Sketches

There was a lot of rumble when Instagram changed their licensing somewhen last year. I never used Instagram for myself, but i know that a lot of creative people left frustrated because of that. Some of them completely stopped sharing images on social networks, some where moving (back) to flickr or to 500px, which might be somewhat better in terms of licensing, but still are third party solution.

I thought there has to be a way to solve this with WordPress and searched for Apps/Plugins etc. but i couldn’t find what i was looking for. If there only was an app, kind of like Instagram or flickr, which would let us connect and share our images directly to our own WordPress Installations, instead of a third party service. It would let us build our own Photo Stream, our own Instagrams, completely self-controlled and not depending on someone else. It would be awesome.

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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.

Tom McFarlin with some interesting thoughts on Shortcodes. Be sure to also read the discussion in the comments.

I completely agree that shortcodes – even if they work in some cases – always feel to hacky for me especially if normal users should be able to handle the content at the end.

My current “solution” is to be as helpful for the enduser as possible. That means including custom TinyMCE Buttons in the editor to add shortcodes, trying to show a placeholder image instead of just the shortcode text where possible. Generally speaking: If i have to explain to a client what a shortcode is, it’s not the optimal solution.

And most importantly: Always write a custom plugin for shortcode! There’s no reason to implement a shortcode in a theme.

A Case Against WordPress Shortcodes – Tom McFarlin.