So, I consider myself a “advanced novice” at WordPress development but I still do not have the concept of pages and templates fully understood. I’m having an issue with a feature I’m attempting to include in my plugin and discovered that it’s possibly due to the way I am displaying my interfaces on the pages (via shortcodes). Without customizing a theme, how would one display interfaces (grid with interactive functionality) on the font-end? The way my plugin works currently is that it uses shortcodes to house all of my php code that performs the work to display my interfaces and those shortcodes are added as content to pages that my plugin creates upon activation. Is there another way to do this?
Front-End Interfaces Without Shortcodes
What you’re doing is, in my opinion, the best way to accomplish this. First off, the pages are a good way to go, because they give users the ability to customize parts of the page like title, meta fields, etc. You don’t have to use shortcodes per se, you can filter
the_contentfor these pages, but shortcodes offer additional flexibility. For instance, your users can call them directly in a template file if they don’t want to use pages, or they can use them in other posts if they want to use a custom post type or something. Anyway, nice work, this is a great way to go. That doesn’t solve your issue, but you can probably cross it off your list.