Want to check if a shortcode already exists in WordPress? Ever since the launch of WordPress 3.6 in 2013 you can easily check to see if a shortcode has been registered in WordPress with the shortcode_exists function. Shortcodes are a common way to output markup the editor strips or mangles, such as an iframe embed.
This can be useful if you’re adding functionality to your theme’s functions.php file with code snippets or creating a specific plugin for your site. Since you don’t want to overwrite existing shortcodes it’s best to check if it already exists before registering a shortcode.
Additionally this may be useful to check if a shortcode exists before executing a do_shortcode function in your code.
This is also ideal if you’re removing a plugin and you want to catch instances of an existing shortcode on your site without resulting in an error.
For example say you had a plugin using a [modula] shortcode but have removed it to use Envira’s shortcode [envira-gallery]. If you’re a developer you can use this snippet to have [envira-gallery] used everytime [modula] is referenced and correctly change the variables as well.
For more WordPress PHP functions, check out our useful code snippets for WordPress.
