Some weeks ago, whilst working on a client project, we came across a particular issue. The client’s site had content that was ‘gated’ which is the technical term used to describe when a piece of content on a website is hidden, until the reader/user takes a desired action, such as register an account, submit some information (for example email address) or for example, ask the user to become a member on a website with either a free or paid for subscription model.
These types of gated/locked content plugins will usually require you to add the locked-off content in between WordPress shortcodes… for example;
[locker-on]
Add the content to be hidden/locked here
[locker-off]One year down the line however, the client decided to remove those locks entirely, and provide all the content to their readers completely free. Initially, we assumed (wrongly) that simply disabling the locker plugin would free up the content, which it did… but unfortunately, disabling the locker plugin has also made all shortcodes visible to the readers. WordPress, and rightly so, had no idea what to do with them. Research on how to get rid of these orphaned shortcodes was not very helpful as it was either a time-consuming operation, too technical and risky, or would involve the installation of a heavy plugin.
Therefore, we took matters into our own hands and developed our own. And this is how Easy Shortcode Hider was created. It’s a tiny plugin, that is less than 5KB in size, which will allow you to hide any shortcodes that you no longer need. This plugin is 100% free and you can download and re-use in any way you like. If you find this plugin useful, it would be great if you would consider simply sharing this page to your social media pages so that we get a little bit of credit/thanks… but this is 100% optional of course 🙂