I recently changed the theme of my blog. It is an amazing theme but it broke all the previous Shortcodes on my blog.
And there are literally hundreds of Shortcodes. I knew that at some point in time, I had to change the theme. That is why I used Ultimate Shortcodes plugin for that.
Because the theme based shortcodes would break and shortcodes created from plugins like Ultimate Shortcode will keep working. So, I chose a Plugin because I wanted this flexibility of changing the themes.
But the theme I am using has its own set of shortcodes, and the codes are mostly the same, which results in breaking the shortcodes here and there. I actually realised it a few weeks later when I had to edit an old post.
Now I was stuck because,
a) I had invested in a premium theme,
b) I spent some good time to customise the theme and was quite happy with the result.
So, changing the theme was not an option. And I decided to fix the short codes manually by changing them.
Shortcode Ultimate plugin gives you an option to add a prefix to the codes so that they become unique.
Note: I recommend every one to add a prefix when they start using Ultimate Shortcode, just to be sure, nothing like this happens.
So, if su_ is added to all the shortcodes, all of them would come back to life. But going to every post and editing them is a very boring task. Especially when there are 400+ posts to take care of.
How to fix broken shortcodes in 5 minutes
Fortunately, there is a way to automate this. We all know the functionality of Search & Replace.
And I found a plugin that Search & Replaces a word in the database.
What does this mean for you?
For non-technical people, the database contains every information of a blog in text format, and this plugin searches for a word and replaces with a word you type.
Which means,
Note: First I’ve to add the prefix Su_ in the Shortcode Ultimate settings before going further.
If I search for Note and replace is it Su_Note the codes would start working.
So, I install the plugin from the plugin area and activate it, the settings of the plugin can be found under the tools section.
Now type the word of the short code and replace it with su_code (where the code can be Note, Button, Table or any other code). as shown in the image below.
When I go back, I can see the short code is back to life.
So, with this trick, we can pick the broken shortcodes to type it for search and enter the new version in replace area.
I saved several hours of my work time by fixing broken shortcodes in just 5 minutes.
This plugin is also helpful in fixing broken links, changing the URLs. or any other elements.
