Bludit Shortcodes!

If you've written more than a handful of posts in any CMS, you've probably had this moment: you find yourself typing the same little chunk of markup over and over. The YouTube embed boilerplate. A "last updated" line. The same callout box markup. Your email address. The current year in a sidebar. None of it is hard. But it adds up, and the second you want to change one of them across the site, you're hunting through old posts doing search-and-replace.

WordPress solved this years ago with shortcodes. Bludit, beautifully minimal as it is, doesn't ship with anything like that out of the box. Shorthand fills that gap. Define a tag once in the admin panel, drop it anywhere in your posts and pages, and the plugin expands it at render time. That's the whole pitch.

Define once, use anywhere

The idea is simple. In the plugin settings you give a shortcode a name and a template. From then on, anywhere you write [name] in a post, the plugin swaps it for whatever the template says.

The simplest case is plain text replacement. Define a shortcode named year with the template 2026 and [year] produces 2026 wherever you put it. When the new year rolls around you change it in one place and the entire site updates.

It gets more useful when you bring in attributes. A template can reference attribute values with {attr-name} placeholders, so an email shortcode with the template <a href="mailto:{to}">{to}</a> lets you write [email to="hi@example.com"] in a post and get back a proper mailto link. Define a yt shortcode for YouTube embeds and you never have to remember the iframe boilerplate again.

For shortcodes that wrap content, there's a {content} placeholder for the text between opening and closing tags. A styled callout box becomes [callout type="warning"]Heads up![/callout]. The plugin figures out whether your template needs a closing tag by checking if {content} appears in it.

Works in both editors

This matters more than it sounds. Bludit lets you write pages in either Markdown or its HTML editor, and Shorthand handles both. Shortcodes are expanded before the Markdown parser runs, which means a template can emit Markdown or HTML on Markdown-source pages, and HTML on HTML-source pages. If you're not sure which you'll use, write HTML-emitting templates and they'll work in either editor.

Safe by default

Templating features in a CMS can make me a little nervous, because they're often a path for an editor account to inject something nasty. Shorthand has sensible guardrails built in.

Only administrators can define or edit templates. Editors only ever use them. Attribute values that editors type into a post are escaped before they hit the template, URL-style attributes are checked for dangerous schemes, and the admin form will warn you if a template puts a placeholder somewhere risky. If you're a solo admin you won't think about it much, but it's a nice safety net the day you add a contributor.

The small things that make it nicer to use

A few touches I appreciated once I started using it:

Templates can reference other shortcodes. The plugin resolves up to three passes deep and then stops, so you can compose shortcodes without ever risking an infinite loop.
Attribute values can be wrapped in double quotes, single quotes, or written bare for simple values.
Shortcode names accept letters, digits, hyphens, and underscores, so you can write something readable like [product-card] instead of cramming everything into one word.

Who this is for

Anyone running Bludit who's noticed they're copying and pasting the same snippets across posts. Anyone who wants to be able to change one bit of markup site-wide without opening every page. Anyone who'd rather their post source read [callout type="warning"]Heads up![/callout] than a <div> with three nested classes.

It's a small plugin that solves a problem you don't necessarily realize you have until you stop having it. If you're already on Bludit 3.22, it's worth the ten minutes of setup.

AI Disclosure

This project was created with the help of AI.