Shortcode templates

Question

I don't know if this is the correct way to approach this, but here it goes. I'm working on Visual Composer (but could be vanilla WP), and I'm trying to implement a shortcode which generates another bunch of shortcodes. Somewhat a template shortcode.

For example:

[test title="some title"]

Could be converted to:

[another_shortcode]
    [title]some title[/title]
    [get_posts total="5"]
[/another_shortcode]

Which will be further processed until the HTML is generated.

The thing that I'm trying to achieve is to tell the user to use some shortcodes which will generate a concrete Visual Composer shortcodes. This way I'm abstracting away the layout and if there are lot's of pages with a given layout they can be changed changing the shortcode.

Does make any sense? Is it doable?

Answer 1

Using do_shortcode within a shortcode does the trick of parsing the inner shortcodes. More information here: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/do_shortcode/

Answer 2

Use do shortcode:

<?php echo do_shortcode('[yourshortcode]'); ?>