Overview

Presently, there is no convenient way for a WordPress developer to determine whether a CiviCRM shortcode is in use on the current page.

There have been a few reports of WordPress filters such as wpautop, which replaces double line-breaks with paragraph elements, needing to be tamed on CiviCRM pages. In the case of wpautop run amok, the CiviCRM code itself gets wrapped in paragraph tags – this is most obvious when wrapped JavaScript and throws parse errors. Often these problems can be addressed by adding something like the following to the theme's functions.php file:

if(civicrm_wp_in_civicrm()) {
  remove_filter('the_content', 'problematicFilter');
}

However, civicrm_wp_in_civicrm() does not return true when CiviCRM content is displayed via shortcode, and there isn't a good way to prevent an aggressive filter from being applied to CiviCRM shortcode content.

Proposed Solution

The proposed solution is to expose information about the active shortcodes through the CiviCRM_For_WordPress singleton. The linked pull request adds a global function civicrm_wp_is_shortcode() which returns a boolean. With this utility, a developer can do something like this in the theme's functions.php:

// listen for the civicrm_shortcodes_parsed event, then determine
// what kind of page we're on and manage filters accordingly
add_action('civicrm_shortcodes_parsed', 'manageCiviFilters');

function manageCiviFilters () {
  if (civicrm_wp_is_shortcode()) {
    add_filter('the_content', 'fancyShortcodeFilter');
  }

  if (civicrm_wp_is_shortcode() || civicrm_wp_in_civicrm()) {
    remove_filter('the_content', 'civiUnawareFilter');
  }
}

function fancyShortcodeFilter($content) {
  // remove some text we don't want to display in shortcode mode
  return $content;
}