Repackage Shortcodes

Like many people, I have Visual Composer as well as other themes and addons that include a ton of great shortcodes. I would like to package these in a friendly way to use in Beaver Builder. I understand my users can paste in the shortcodes into text boxes within Beaver but that’s not very friendly.

I would love to be able to repackage them in a form where it’s similar to the built in beaver modules - where the attributes are filled in through an intuitive interface. What would be the best way to approach this - creating a custom beaver module for each shortcode or creating a custom widget. Any pointers you could give as to how to approach this would be greatly appreciated. There are lots of shortcodes I would need to do this for, so I’m looking for an efficient way to do this where it also creates an elegant user experience.

Hey Steve. That’s a really good question. We’d love to see what you come up with if you do end up building something like you’re describing. Both of the options you mentioned should work. Either writing a WordPress plugin/widget to manage all of the short codes, or, writing a custom module. I would guess that going the custom module route would be a bit quicker. Utilizing Beaver Builder’s custom module framework will save you a bunch of time writing forms/markup for user input. I’ll discuss this with the team later today to make sure they agree, but I would take a stab at it using custom modules.

Thanks Robby. I look forward to any further suggestions the team may have. It could be a cool addon (or inclusion) with Beaver Builder to have, for example, all of the Visual Composer shortcodes bundled as user friendly modules. It would make migrating to Beaver Builder a no-brainer, make it instantly compatible with the hundreds of themes that include Visual Composer, and add a whole bunch of functionality.

Hey Steve,

Robby’s correct that creating custom modules would be the way to go, although, creating widgets isn’t a bad idea either. It’s really a matter of which you prefer. Widgets can be used at Appearance > Widgets, so that may be a reason to go that route.

We’ll keep the Visual Composer shortcodes idea in mind. As always, you can submit ideas to our feedback forum for other users to vote on. That ultimately helps us decide what to focus on next.

Thanks,
Justin