Today I stumbled upon a post in one of the SDN forums asking whether anyone had ever implemented shortcodes in Sitecore.

I have not seen an implementation of this for Sitecore — if you know of one, please drop a comment — but am quite familiar with these in WordPress — I use them to format code in my blog posts using the [code language=”csharp”]//code goes in here[/code] shortcode — and felt I should take on the challenge of implementing a “proof of concept” for this in Sitecore.

I first created a POCO that will hold shortcode data: the shortcode itself and the content (or markup) that the shortcode represents after being expanded:

namespace Sitecore.Sandbox.Pipelines.ExpandShortcodes
{
    public class Shortcode
    {
        public string Unexpanded { get; set; }

        public string Expanded { get; set; }
    }
}

I thought it would be best to put the logic that expands shortcodes into a new pipeline, and defined a pipeline arguments class for it:

using Sitecore.Pipelines;

namespace Sitecore.Sandbox.Pipelines.ExpandShortcodes
{
    public class ExpandShortcodesArgs : PipelineArgs
    {
        public string Content { get; set; }
    }
}

There really isn’t much to this arguments class — we will only be passing around a string of content that will contain shortcodes to be expanded.

Before moving forward on building pipeline processors for the new pipeline, I saw that I could leverage the template method pattern to help me process collections of Shortcode instances in an abstract base class:

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

using Sitecore.Diagnostics;

namespace Sitecore.Sandbox.Pipelines.ExpandShortcodes
{
    public abstract class ExpandShortcodesProcessor
    {
        public virtual void Process(ExpandShortcodesArgs args)
        {
            if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(args.Content))
            {
                return;
            }

            IEnumerable<Shortcode> shortcodes = GetShortcodes(args.Content);
            if (shortcodes == null || !shortcodes.Any())
            {
                return;
            }

            args.Content = ExpandShortcodes(shortcodes, args.Content);
        }

        protected abstract IEnumerable<Shortcode> GetShortcodes(string content);

        protected virtual string ExpandShortcodes(IEnumerable<Shortcode> shortcodes, string content)
        {
            Assert.ArgumentNotNull(shortcodes, "shortcodes");
            Assert.ArgumentNotNull(content, "content");
            string contentExpanded = content;
            foreach (Shortcode shortcode in shortcodes)
            {
                contentExpanded = contentExpanded.Replace(shortcode.Unexpanded, shortcode.Expanded);
            }

            return contentExpanded;
        }
    }
}

The above class iterates over all Shortcode instances, and replaces shortcodes with their expanded content.

Each subclass processor of ExpandShortcodesProcessor are to “fill in the blanks” of the algorithm defined in the base class by implementing the GetShortcodes method only — this is where the heavy lifting of grabbing the shortcodes from the passed string of content, and the expansion of these shortcodes are done. Both are then set in new Shortcode instances.

Once the base class was built, I developed an example ExpandShortcodesProcessor subclass to expand [BigBlueText]content goes in here[/BigBlueText] shortcodes (in case you’re wondering, I completely fabricated this shortcode — it does not exist in the real world):

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace Sitecore.Sandbox.Pipelines.ExpandShortcodes
{
    public class ExpandBigBlueTextShortcodes : ExpandShortcodesProcessor
    {
        protected override IEnumerable<Shortcode> GetShortcodes(string content)
        {
            if(string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(content))
            {
                return new List<Shortcode>();
            }

            IList<Shortcode> shortcodes = new List<Shortcode>();
            MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(content, @"\[BigBlueText\](.*?)\[/BigBlueText\]", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

            foreach (Match match in matches)
            {
                string innerText = match.Groups[1].Value.Trim();
                if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(innerText))
                {
                    shortcodes.Add
                    (
                        new Shortcode
                        {
                            Unexpanded = match.Value,
                            Expanded = string.Format(@"<span style=""font-size:56px;color:blue;"">{0}</span>", innerText)
                        }
                    );
                }
            }

            return shortcodes;
        }
    }
}

I followed the above example processor with another — a new one to expand [YouTube id=”video id goes in here”] shortcodes (this one is made up as well, although YouTube shortcodes do exist out in the wild):

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace Sitecore.Sandbox.Pipelines.ExpandShortcodes
{
    public class ExpandYouTubeShortcodes : ExpandShortcodesProcessor
    {
        protected override IEnumerable<Shortcode> GetShortcodes(string content)
        {
            if(string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(content))
            {
                return new List<Shortcode>();
            }

            IList<Shortcode> shortcodes = new List<Shortcode>();
            MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(content, @"\[youtube\s+id=""(.*?)""\]", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

            foreach (Match match in matches)
            {
                string id = match.Groups[1].Value.Trim();
                if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id))
                {
                    shortcodes.Add
                    (
                        new Shortcode
                        {
                            Unexpanded = match.Value,
                            Expanded = string.Format(@"", id)
                        }
                    );
                }
            }

            return shortcodes;
        }
    }
}

Next I built a renderField pipeline processor to invoke our new pipeline when the field is a text field of some sort — yes, all fields in Sitecore are fundamentally strings behind the scenes but I’m referring to Single-Line Text, Multi-Line Text, Rich Text, and the deprecated text fields — to expand our shortcodes:

using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
using Sitecore.Pipelines;
using Sitecore.Pipelines.RenderField;

using Sitecore.Sandbox.Pipelines.ExpandShortcodes;

namespace Sitecore.Sandbox.Pipelines.RenderField
{
    public class ExpandShortcodes
    {
        public void Process(RenderFieldArgs args)
        {
            if (!ShouldFieldBeProcessed(args))
            {
                return;
            }

            args.Result.FirstPart = GetExpandedShortcodes(args.Result.FirstPart);
        }

        private static bool ShouldFieldBeProcessed(RenderFieldArgs args)
        {
            Assert.ArgumentNotNull(args, "args");
            Assert.ArgumentNotNull(args.FieldTypeKey, "args.FieldTypeKey");
            string fieldTypeKey = args.FieldTypeKey.ToLower();
            return fieldTypeKey == "text"
                    || fieldTypeKey == "rich text"
                    || fieldTypeKey == "single-line text"
                    || fieldTypeKey == "multi-line text";
        }

        private static string GetExpandedShortcodes(string content)
        {
            Assert.ArgumentNotNull(content, "content");
            ExpandShortcodesArgs args = new ExpandShortcodesArgs { Content = content };
            CorePipeline.Run("expandShortcodes", args);
            return args.Content;
        }
    }
}

I cemented all the pieces together using a Sitecore configuration file — this should go in your /App_Config/Include/ folder:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <pipelines>
      <expandShortcodes>
        <processor type="Sitecore.Sandbox.Pipelines.ExpandShortcodes.ExpandYouTubeShortcodes, Sitecore.Sandbox" />
        <processor type="Sitecore.Sandbox.Pipelines.ExpandShortcodes.ExpandBigBlueTextShortcodes, Sitecore.Sandbox" />
      </expandShortcodes>
      <renderField>
        <processor type="Sitecore.Sandbox.Pipelines.RenderField.ExpandShortcodes, Sitecore.Sandbox" 
                   patch:after="processor[@type='Sitecore.Pipelines.RenderField.GetTextFieldValue, Sitecore.Kernel']" />
      </renderField>
    </pipelines>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

Let’s see the above code in action.

I created a test item, and added BigBlueText and YouTube shortcodes into two different text fields:

I saved, published, and then navigated to the test item:

As you can see, our shortcodes were expanded.

If you have any thoughts on this, or ideas around a better shortcode framework for Sitecore, please share in a comment.