Simple Shortcodes Support

I really like Simple Shortcodes. I did make a few quick changes though after install.

I had to set the simple_shortcodes.value varchar higher (and related maxlength to admin input). Luckily I have MySQL 5.0.32 to support this, although I guess a work-around for pre-5.0.3 would be to string together shortcodes, e.g. [ccbyncsa1][ccbyncsa2].

The other change I made was to use single-quotes on the value attribute of SS_value. I use double-quotes for most of my coding so maybe this is a personal preference.

Either way, nice plugin. I like the easy ones.

Overall, your plugin works exactly as expected and seems to fill one of the few major holes in WP’s feature set. However I have run into some problems. I created two shortcodes called [test] and . They both caused the whole WordPress site to stop working with error messages like:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘[‘, expecting T_STRING in /home/website/public_html/draco/wp-content/plugins/simple-shortcodes/MB_SS_Handler.php on line 37

I got the site back up by deleting the offending entry in MB_SS_Handler.php and dropping the database table, but that solution is a lot of extra work; if you run into this same problem, it’s easier to simply delete the MB_SS_Handler.php outright via FTP or an online file manager and then delete the shortcode causing the problem via the configuration page in WordPress.

On the up side, I did discover that you can fool the plugin into recreating its own database table by advancing the version number found in simple_shortcodes.php. In this case, I changed $plugin_db_version from 0.3 to 0.4 and everything worked fine.

On a lesser note, the configuration screen is one of the plugin’s weaknesses. Changing the vertical size of the value field results in things looking a little odd: the name field is always centered, vertically, relative to the value field.

Inline documentation could also be improved. I had to refer to the readme to be certain what the option values referred to (I didn’t want to try them out without knowing, though I had my theory). I also was initially unclear about what “Display HTML Markup” did. The documentation in the readme is clear; the inline documentation is less so.

I have installed s-shortcode on two WP blogs on the same domain and same database. Database #1 is biz_ and #2 is montage_. I would like to use the same s-shortcode tables for both, say from biz_simple_shortcode tables in both WP blogs. I changed the code in simple_shortcodes.php as follows;
// $this->db_table_name = $wpdb->prefix . “simple_shortcodes”;
$this->db_table_name = “biz_simple_shortcodes”;

It allows me to edit but it does not show up in the post. Can this work and if so what am I missing? Thanks in advance for your help, I love the plugin.

The MB_SS_Handler.php file is the missing link for me to accomplish the sharing between blogs (I hope). The plugin in recognized in two blogs in that I can edit the database tables from either blog, but the MB_SS_Handler.php is local, so I need to figure out how to use only one copy across the blogs or how to update the file from the database each time the blog is opened. Your plugin is great and I want to use it to have global values that I can use in multiple blogs. Since the blogs all use the same database I hope to make simlpe mods to your plugin to get a lift from the global simple shortcodes. Thanks again for your help.