While simple shortcodes already provide a lot of potential to output complex content to a page by entering a few characters in the post editor, shortcodes become even more useful when they are coupled with parameters that will be passed to their associated processing function. Using this technique, it becomes very easy to create a shortcode that accelerates the insertion of external content in WordPress posts or pages by only needing to specify the shortcode and the unique identifier of the source element to be displayed.
We will illustrate this concept in this recipe by creating a shortcode that will be used to quickly add Twitter feeds to posts or pages.
- Navigate to the WordPress plugin directory of your development installation.
- Create a new directory called
ch2-twitter-embed
. - Navigate to this directory and create a new text file called
ch2-twitter-embed.php
. - Open the new file in a code editor and add an appropriate header at the top...