Rating: 5 stars

Include easily a Shorthand Story to wordpress. It could have more customization options, but it does the job.

Keep in mind, the plugin will download the content of the story to your wordpress, so if you don’t have enough memory, wordpress will crash while trying to update/publish the story

Rating: 2 stars

In theory this would be a great plugin for letting clients drop their Shorthand stories into their own websites rather than manually uploading the files to the server. However, there are a number of problems with the plugin that make it basically unusable in its current form.

The main one is that the default template for a Shorthand story includes get_header() and get_footer(), and drops the Shorthand story in using the_content(). This means that what should be a full-width design is actually crammed into the content area of a default template, however wide that is. The plugin seems to assume that get_header() and get_footer() don’t include content wrapping tags, but that’s not a helpful assumption.

The plugin also drops the entirety of its HTML code into the_content() including the <title> tag and <meta> tags such as viewport, Open Graph, Twitter and charset. That’s a strange decision given that the body tag isn’t written out in that code. Either you assume that the body tag hasn’t been written and include the meta tags, or you write the body tag yourself.

This wouldn’t matter so much if you were able to override the default template by using a single-shorthand_story.php template file in your theme, but this doesn’t override the template provided by the plugin, so your choice is to edit the plugin files – which would get overwritten by any updates – or use the default template.

Finally, even if you do edit the template file in the plugin just to drop in the Shorthand content, the content doesn’t render correctly for some reason – there are missing slides which seem to be overlaid by other ones. It also tries to load non-existent web fonts from the shorthand directory, meaning that the fonts aren’t rendered correctly.

Perhaps there are ways around this, but that’s difficult to tell because Shorthand haven’t seen fit to write any documentation on how to use the plugin here in the plugin directory and just direct you to their support email addresses, which isn’t acceptable for basic usage instructions.

Two stars for something that does sort of work, with an easy-to-set-up API connection, but this needs significant improvement, including basic documentation, before it’s usable.