Displaying shortcodes in Posts Table Pro
The Shortcodes option in Posts Table Pro allows you to display content generated by any shortcodes used on your site, or page builders such as Gutenberg. It also tells the plugin to render any HTML or other formatting from your posts, instead of displaying it as plain text.
You can enable this option on the plugin settings page, or directly in a shortcode by adding shortcodes="true" to the [posts_table] or [posts_table_template id=""] shortcode (e.g. [posts_table] shortcodes="true"].
Note: This article is about using shortcodes to display content inside the columns of the table, such as in the content column. Please see our separate article about how to use a shortcode to list posts.
Examples of shortcodes displayed in a table
There are lots of reasons why you might want to display shortcodes, HTML or other formatting within a table. For example:
- WordPress provides several built-in shortcodes for displaying audio files, videos, media playlists and image galleries. You can display these embedded media files directly in a table.
- Your theme or another plugin might provide shortcodes to add buttons, icons or other styles. You can include these in a table.
- You might want text formatting such as bold, paragraph breaks or hyperlinks to appear in the table, instead of having this stripped out.
Why don't my shortcodes or Gutenberg layouts display?
By default, the shortcodes option is disabled in Posts Table Pro. This will remove all shortcodes from your table, as well as disabling other formatting such as HTML. This is because:
- Processing shortcode content can take a significant amount of time – especially for large tables – so enabling them can have a performance impact on your site.
- Shortcodes often add HTML to the content which makes it difficult to limit content to a set number of words (see Content length and Excerpt length). For this reason, if you enable shortcodes, then the full content is always displayed and the content length option is ignored.
The same happens if you have used the Gutenberg editor to create the content of the posts that you are displaying.
How to display shortcode content and Gutenberg layouts
You can display shortcodes and other formatting in the table by enabling the shortcodes option, as described above.
Once you've done this, you can add shortcodes to any of the fields that you are displaying as columns in Posts Table Pro. For example, if your table contains a 'Content' column then you can enable the Shortcodes option and add shortcodes to the content of your posts so that they appear in the table.