Shortcode

A ruby gem for parsing Wordpress style shortcodes. The gem uses a PEG (Parsing Expression Grammar) parser rather than using regular expressions so its easier to understand, test and extend.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'shortcode'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install shortcode

Usage

Example

Shortcode can be used in one of two ways, the parser and transformer can be called seperatly or the process method can be used which performs both the parsing and transforming and returns the result.

The former is good if you want to work with the intemediary hash returned by the parser

parser = Shortcode::Parser.new
transformer = Shortcode::Transformer.new
parsed_hash = parser.parse("[quote]Hello World[/quote]")
transformer.apply(parsed_hash)

The shorthand wraps up the above code into a single method call for convenience

Shortcode.process("[quote]Hello World[/quote]")

Configuration

Shortcode.setup do |config|

  # the template parser to use
  config.template_parser = :haml # :erb or :haml supported, :haml is default

   # location of the template files
  config.template_path = "support/templates/haml"

  # a list of block tags to support e.g. [quote]Hello World[/quote]
  config.block_tags = [:quote]

  # a list of self closing tags to support e.g. [youtube id="12345"]
  config.self_closing_tags = [:youtube]
end

Templates

Each shortcode tag needs a template file to translate the shortcode into html. Templates can be written in HAML or erb and work in a similar way to views in Rails. The main content of a tag is passed via the instance variable @content. Any attributes defined on a tag are passed in via an @attributes hash, shortcodes can have any number of attributes. For instance a quote shortcode might look like this:

[quote author="Homer Simpson"]Doh![/quote]

And the haml template to render the shortcode

%blockquote
  %p.quotation= @content
  -if @attributes[:author]
    %p.citation
      %span.author= @attributes[:author]

Shortcodes can be nested inside other shortcodes, there are no limits imposed on the nesting depth. This can be useful when creating complex content such as a collapsible list that can have any content inside each element. We could have the following shortcodes

[collapsible_list]
  [item]
    [youtube id="12345"]
  [/item]
  [item]Hellow World[/item]
[/collapsible_list]

Three templates would be required to support the above content, [:collapsible_list, :item, :youtube]. Each template is rendered in isolation and has no knowledge of parent or child elements.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request