No joy with shortcodes at all (Newbie)

  • Be gentle with me as I’m a complete WordPress novice, though I’ve used other CMS systems before. Apologies also if this is silly problem, or more likely it’s far too vague to start troubleshooting.

    I’m running WP 5.1.1 and MCM 1.9.3. The back end seems to working great, and I can add and assign categories with no trouble at all. When I try to call media into a post or page using shortcode however, I’m getting nothing. I’ve tried all permutations of shortcode in the support files, and I’ve put them into paragraph blocks and shortcode blocks, yet nothing is appearing in the displayed page where the media should be. Other text or object elements are appearing as expected, and I can call shortcode from other plugins without trouble. Looking at the page source seems to suggest that the page rendering engine is just dropping the code completely. I’ve repeated this in different templates with the same result.

    My objective is to use shortcode to display all media of a given category in a static page, and that looks like it should be easy to achieve straight out the box. MCM ticks all my boxes, so I really want to get it going.

    So, newbie questions. Is there something in plug in settings, page settings or theme settings that I need to enable (other than, of course, activating the plug in)? This feels like it’s got a really, really easy solution.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author DeBAAT

    (@debaat)

    Hai ComedyNose,

    No problem.
    As a matter of fact, you just found some missing functionality.

    When only using the shortcode WP_MCM without any parameters, it should show the media that have been assigned the category that is defined as default in the settings.
    This works fine as long as the default is set to some category defined. However, when the default value is set to “No default category” (as I suspect is as in your case), it didn’t show anything.

    In V1.9.4, I have fixed it in such a way that it shows all media that have not been assigned a category (yet).

    Hope this helps.

    Best,
    Jan

    Thread Starter comedynose

    (@comedynose)

    Jan, you are an absolute gent! Thanks for the update, which has given me some progress, in that I’m getting some media displayed!

    I’m now left with two problems, which are:

    1. Categorisation is working correctly in posts, but not in pages. If I add the shortcode to a static page it appears as if it’s not parsing the category request and just throws up the uncategorised media. I’m guessing WordPress treats the two entities differently.

    2. Maybe this isn’t a problem and is just a function, but pretty much all the media I need to deal with on this site is video. The post is displaying the categorised image content (from JPGs in this case) but isn’t displaying any video. Is this expected behaviour from the plugin?

    Thank you again for your time – I’m guessing this isn’t your day job!

    Cheers,

    Pete

    Plugin Author DeBAAT

    (@debaat)

    Hai Pete,

    Thanks for the compliments. And you’re right this isn’t my day job ??

    Regarding your two problems:

    1. Don’t know what might be the problem here. As far as I know, there is some difference in how WordPress treats pages and posts but not regarding the processing of shortcodes or media. And I have tested this myself on my own test site and indeed, I do not see any issues.
    2. What you describe is indeed expected behaviour. The plugin generates a list of media to display using the default gallery function of WordPress which is not really capable of handling video media. That’s one of the reasons I made it possible to let another plugin handle the list generated. Mayby you should try to find another plugin which can present the video’s the way you want.

    Hope this helps.

    Best,
    Jan

    Thread Starter comedynose

    (@comedynose)

    Thanks for the swift response Jan. Grand, I’ll persevere with it and see if I can sort out my static pages and I’ll look at other gallery handlers for video.

    Thanks again for the help.

    Pete

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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