Using shortcodes to communicate my page design

Question

I came across this page http://flare.bringthepixel.com/pages/services/ and on it there is this message: "The entire code of this sample page is available in the Shortcode Generator".

Lets say i gave someone this theme and wanted to produce his/her own page look just like the one shown without inserting one shortcode after another.Can shortcodes be used to make one big page "template" such that with one insertion of shortcode,the design in the services page shall be inserted and the user shall only swap the dummy content for his/her own?.

Answer 1

If you are going to use that shortcode inside post/page content, then you can build any layout/design with that shortcode. You can do even more if you are calling do_shortcode() in your theme.

Technically its possible to do it and whether it would be a good implementation or not depends on the use case. Like for specific layouts inside the page content, this is an excellent choice but for using it as a substitutes to page templates, that will be a bad design choice.

You can do pretty much inside a shortcode, point is when you should. Read more on implementation here - http://codex.wordpress.org/Shortcode_API