Shortcodes In Use

Yes, all shortcodes known to WordPress (Admin) are listed, grouped by provider, and possibly sub-grouped by plugin or theme name. You can select to filter by any number of them, or by either the provider or the specific plugin/theme. Note that you do not get any information about their use or function.

Yes, assuming it is in the standard format. By default, anything that looks like a shortcode is reported, the only exception being shortcodes that are “escaped” (by doubling up on the containing square brackets). You can filter the results to just Unknown shortcodes, or you can search for a specific shortcode regardless or whether WordPress knows about it or not.

Yes, the shortcodes are processed recursively, and nesting is indicated by a level of indentation in the results table. However, please be aware that indentation only indicates that the shortcode in question is nested somewhere within the shortcode at the lesser level of indentation; it does not necessarily provide any indication of howy deeply it’s nested, because the search/filter parameters may exclude any of the containing shortcodes from being reported. For this same reason, a lack of indentation does not necessarily mean that the shortcode is not nested within another shortcode. In other words, any indentation is only relative to the reported shortcodes.

It’s hierarchical, with (up to) 3 levels : general provider, named provider, and tags. Select nothing amd they’re all included. Select a named provider and all its tags get included. Select a general provider and all its named providers (ie. all their tags) get included. As soon as you select anything, whatever remains unchecked and outside the immediate scope of the checked item (ie. not hierarchically below) gets excluded. As an example, if you check “WordPress” without checking “Plugin” then you won’t get any results for shortcodes provided by plugins.

You can select multiple tags, multiple providers (general or named). What you can’t do is select, for example, a named provider and one of its tags. Selecting a named provider gets all its tags. If you only want one or two of its tags then select them individually and don’t try selecting the provider. Same applies when selecting a general provider.

Checked items are highlighted. Also, because the tree is collapsible (and starts out collapsed), unchecked ancestors of checked items are also highlighted in order to provide visual feedback that something (possibly hidden from sight) has been selected.

Based on the Location filters, the plugin caches the ids of database records that contain likely-looking shortcodes. It does not cache the results of any inspection of those records’ content. If you change the Location filters (excluding Widget, which does not require database access) such that any cached ids do not accurately reflect the new filters, then the cache is discarded and refreshed with a new set of ids. The cache is only kept for 15 minutes, and can be manually discarded at any time. Enquiries run via the shortcode do not use or set the cache.

You may well not. But…

Some plugins – for example, the WP Photo Album Plus plugin – don’t add their shortcode if you are in the admin backend (and I hasten to add that there is nothing wrong with that approach). What this means though, is that this plugin can’t then determine the provider of that shortcode when it finds it in, say, a page’s content, because WordPress hasn’t been told about it. The Tool can only report it as Unknown Provider.

So, if you get too many unknowns turning up you may want to run a quick check to make see if they can can be resolved when running the shortcode on a front end page : stick a [shortcodes_in_use provider=unknown/] shortcode onto a page and view it while logged in as Admin?