Gain more time while developing by choosing the right plugin

May 25, 2015 09:44 GMT  ·  By

Narrowing down the plugins you work with can help you get a lot more work done by choosing and installing the right tools for the right job. When it comes to UI widgets, there are a few shortcode collections available, but Shortcodes Ultimate stands above the rest.

Knowledge and time are the most important resources developers have at their disposal. While knowledge is acquired by attending classes, learning to code and design yourself, or following the advice of mentors and colleagues, time is gained by implementing a well-organized program and choosing the best tools for each job.

You can gain more time for other tasks, or just yourself when working with WordPress by merging the functionality of different plugins into one single tool. This can usually be done for social sharing tools, opting to use one plugin that deals with all social networks at the same time instead of one plugin-per-network, but there's another area where this philosophy  can be applied as well, and that's UI.

While most commercial WordPress themes provide a bunch of UI widgets that can be added to posts and pages through shortcodes, the same functionality is 99% of the time missing from open source themes.

As a developer, if you're working on a project where the client doesn't want to use a commercial theme but would like this very same functionality, most of the times you make a list of UI components the client would want in his custom theme and create shortcodes for each.

A similar method for this very same task is to take the client's UI component list and then add various plugins that can output the desired widgets. Both methods are very time consuming, especially the first, and tend to bog down the developer in trivial tasks instead of letting him handle anything else.

You can use just one plugin to handle and embed multiple UI components

Fortunately, developer Vladimir Anokhin has encountered this problem in the past and has developed an open source plugin that deals with this problem. The plugin is called Shortcodes Ultimate and is an extensive collection of UI widgets that can be outputted in any section of the site via shortcodes, regardless of the underlying WordPress theme.

The plugin works via a simple button added to the page's WYSIWYG editor which opens a dialog containing a huge list of UI components. Here developers can select, create and fill-in the component they'd like to have added to their pages and automatically generate the shortcode needed to render it on the frontend.

Shortcodes Ultimate comes with lots of built-in UI components
Shortcodes Ultimate comes with lots of built-in UI components

Columns, accordions, tab panels, video embeds, buttons, dividers, spoiler alerts, and many other UI widgets are built in the plugin's core, coming with examples and the ability to save a preset format for all subsequent uses.

Using Shortcodes Ultimate will allow the developer to skip on installing different plugins for different UI components, and use only one instead. All UI components have their own default style, but the great thing about Shortcodes Ultimate is that it also lets developers add custom CSS and create their own skins that fit in the theme's native UI.

Shortcodes Ultimate really needs to be in your favorites list when it comes to WordPress development, and if you don't like it, then you can check WordPress Shortcodes as an alternate project.

Easily embed UI widgets in your WordPress site with just one plugin (4 Images)

Shortcodes Ultimate comes with lots of built-in UI components
Each component can be tweaked in detail with the pluginDocumentation is provided with each Shortcodes Ultimate component
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