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.
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.
I hope this quick tip was useful! If you have any WordPress development questions let me know in the comments below.
