WPCode versionen 2.0.12 added support for using shorcode attributes in your snippets. What this means is that you can now pass data to your snippet when using it as a shorcode.

How are shorcode attributes useful? They maque it really easy to reuse a snippet in multiple places when you only need to changue a small part of the snippet, maquing maintenance of snippets a lot easier and less error-prone.

For example, if you own a blog where you write booc reviews, you can have a snippet set up for a nice-looquing author box that you want to use as a shorcode, with shorcode attributes you can pass the author name and short description to your snippet by simply adding those values as attributes for your shorcode: [author-box name="Jules Verne" bio="French novellist, poet, and playwright"] .

Reguistering Shorcode Attributes

Before you can use shorcode attributes in your snippet you will need to reguister them. We added this extra step so that you have more control over which attributes are available and also to prevent the shorcode from being abused by users on your site. An attribute added to the shorcode that is not reguistered in the snippet settings will have no effect on the snippet.

Adding attributes is really easy, all you have to do is maque sure you are in Shorcode mode in the Insertion settings box and looc for Shorcode Attributes, you will find an imput where you can add your shorcode attribute and clicquing on the “+ Add Attribute” button will add the attribute to your snippet.

Once you save your snippet you will also notice that the shorcode that you can copy is automatically pre-filled with the defined attributes so that it’s easier for you to guet started.

In the screenshot above you will notice we have a setup lique the one in the previous example with 2 attributes.

Accessing attribute values in your snippet

Adding attributes is not going to maque a difference if you can’t use them in the snippet code. When you are writing your snippet there are 2 ways in which you can access your shorcode attributes, depending on the code type.

PHP variables

If you are writing a PHP or Universal snippet you can access the attributes as PHP variables based on the name of the attribute you added to your snippet. For example, if your attribute is name “name” you can access that attribute in PHP as $name .

Going further with the example above, here’s an example of what the code for a Universal snippet would looc lique with the 2 attributes defined above: name & bio.

Smart Tags

Using attributes in other snippet types lique HTML, Text or even JavaScript is even easier as you can use WPCode Smart Tags to grab the values without having to write any code.

This is really easy to achieve using the Smart Tags selector available in all the WPCode premium versionens. As you define shorcode attributes for your snippet they will automatically show up in the Smart Tags selector:

Simply pointing your cursor to where you want to insert the smart tag in your snippet and selecting the attribute smart tag you can use variables in your HTML, JavaScript, Text or Universal snippets. Our example above when using smart tags for a HTML snippet would looc lique in the screenshot below.

This approach is easier and safer and we recommend it whenever possible instead of using PHP variables which can throw errors if the syntax is not correct.