Enable/Disable shortcodes

[sharpchi]

I was looking at a rival filter that has lots of filter codes, and it occurred to me that I wouldn't want all of them available, wouldn't it be good if they could be individually managed by the site administrator.

Of course, I use your plugin to manage my filter codes, so rather than adding another way of doing shortcodes, was wondering if this plugin could have that capability.

Something along the lines of the assignment sub-plugin management page - though not listing plugins, themselves, but individual shortcodes.

[FMCorz]

Hi @sharpchi,

Thanks for sharing, that's an interesting idea. I suppose that's not a bad idea to allow administrators to disable shortcodes, we'd probably also need an API for plugin developers to test whether the shortcodes have been disabled, as a mean to provide a potential fallback, or notice to their users, if they found themselves in that situation.

Having said that, we're not aware of many other plugins piggybacking filter_shortcodes. The plugin itself barely provides any shortcodes, it relies on other plugins to declare them. I'd be curious to know if your environment contains shortcodes defined by other plugins than Stash, XP, or Quest.

Or is it that you're defining your own shortcodes but still want control over which are enabled, assuming then that your plugin is installed on multiple Moodle sites. As a quick workaround, you could probably add a bit of logic to db/shortcodes.php to change the list of shortcodes as per a config setting, etc. That should work, so long as caches are reset after each change.

[sharpchi]

I started using your plugin at my previous employer and created https://github.com/sharpchi/moodle-local_placeholders which I now use at my current employer, but I don't now use some of the older shortcodes, but didn't want to delete the ones my old employer still uses (I think). So disabling would be useful.
I also use it in a couple of other plugins so I can make component specific shortcodes, bit like you do with block_xp.
That said, I'm planning on expanding placeholders a little, and am also conscious that there could be performance issues with too many active shortcodes, so being able to opt-out means you're only using the ones that you want.

[FMCorz]

Ah that's awesome! I'm glad to hear you were able to create a curated list of shortcodes suited to your needs!

The concern for performance is a valid one, and that's been considered from day one. The plugin implements several mechanisms to be as efficient as possible when looking for shortcodes in the content. I'm sure it can be improved, but it might be good enough for your needs.

• All the shortcodes definitions are cached in Moodle cache.
• Only text that contains [ and ] are processed, so we can abandon very quickly.
• The content is read character per character, which is more efficient than complex regexes.
• And of course, filtered content is cached by Moodle itself, per user, so any heavy process would only occur once.

I think the risk of downgraded performance is very low, even with a large number of shortcode definitions