Shortcode not working

I can confirm this issue with shortcodes, our custom shortcodes are not being rendered by WPTouch template for some reason. Would be nice if WPTouch team fixed this bug. We’re using basic functions to create a shortcode:

function Lead( $atts, $content = null ) {
    return '<div class="lead">'.$content.'</div>';
}
add_shortcode("lead", "Lead");

Unfortunately, WPTouch does not recognize these shortcodes.

Thanks, Viktor
Any idea what I can do?

One of the drawbacks of how WordPress handles shortcode (and post type/field) registration is that it happens anew every time a page on your site is loaded.

When WPtouch handles a mobile request it uses its own mobile themes to handle the display of your content, so when a visitor to your site access it with their smartphone, your desktop theme is not loaded.

If the code for your shortcodes, etc. is inside your desktop theme, whether directly or through a framework inside it, they don’t get registered when WPtouch’s theme is loaded. And, of course, because WordPress then has no idea they exist, WPtouch can’t display their output.

We’ve been able to work around this for custom post type support –?short of trying to load your desktop theme’s functions.php (and subsequent included files), though, there is little WPtouch can do to load shortcodes registered by your desktop theme.

For these features to reliably work for your mobile site, theme developers will need to either move things like this out of their theme files and into a plugin or, in the alternative, ship a basic plugin that just loads the necessary theme files and calls the limited code required to activate those features for mobile requests.

We have example code for such a helper plugin available for review – I would welcome theme/framework developers to collaborate with us to ensure that the features their customers rely on work seamlessly across both desktop and mobile themes.

Martin, thanks for an explanation. That was my assumption. There’s an easier solution, somewhat similar to how other plugins work to integrate with themes (like woocommerce). What about simply having an option where theme developers can create “wptouch.php” file where they simply register all custom features (shortcodes, post types, etc.). WPTouch simply checks for that file. Woocommerce does a similar check with woocommerce.php file.

Where can we find the helper plugin to review and test?

In many instances, shortcodes are used in content for styling, layouts, etc. One thing that could provide somewhat of a compatability, is an option for people to register their shortcodes inside WPTouch, and WPTouch would simply hide those shortcodes from the_content(). That’s the only issue we have with shortcodes, they show up in the content since they were used to layout content in a grid. Hiding them, would be great.

Thanks for the explanation.

Viktor,

WooCommerce’s approach works because the desktop theme remains active when it is being called; WPtouch, on the other hand, replaces your regular theme for mobile page loads, so it is just another deactivated theme as far as WordPress is concerned (for that request only).

Properly separating enhancements into plugins (as some major theme developers have once again started doing) is the best approach.

The plugin we drafted isn’t a plug-and-play object –?rather a proof of concept that works for a particular theme framework. Since each framework uses a different file structure, each will require a different implementation to correct the problem.

Thanks Martin for explanation. Is it possible to get copy of that plugin? I have a client where I would like to try it with and would love to review how you did it… it’s better than starting from scratch ??

I am not sure whether that helps as I am not a coder. I couldn’t write any PHP code from scratch but usually can manage to edit some stuff to make it work the way I want.

I just started testing WPtouch today. However, some time ago I already added a rather simple custom shortcode to my desktop theme. It’s an automatic counter that creates consecutive numbers within a page or post.

I don’t know much about the structure of other themes but my desktop theme has ‘functions.php’ in the theme root which includes ‘lib/shortcodes.php’ for the theme specific shortcodes.
To add my custom shortcode I created a ‘my-shortcodes.php’ file and added a line to ‘functions.php’ to include my custom shortcode file as well.

Of course today WPtouch first simply rendered [shortcodename].
What I then did was to copy my custom shortcode file to the WPtouch theme folder (copy, just in case I want to modify it for the mobile version) and then included it in the WPtouch theme’s ‘function.php’. (Also added the according CSS code to WPtouch). Works!

I guess in case you also want to add the theme specific shortcodes to the WPtouch theme you could just include them the same way. Or if you just want to get rid of those shortcodes create a ‘custom-shortcodes.php’ file with a function for each shortcode like

function xy_shortcode() {return '';}
add_shortcode('xy_shortcode', 'xy_shortcode');

I guess that should work. I am no coder and I doubt that my approach is very elegant and I have no clue yet what happens in case of a plugin update?

Oh, I just found that there is a way to get rid of shortcodes under ‘WPtouch Core Settings / Compatibility’. Stupid me, haha.

Anyway, in my case that way I would lose my automaticly created image numbers.
Example here: https://studioa.eu/portfolio/building-facades/
(Currently only desktop version online)