I already mentioned this in an addendum to my last blog post, but it seems to warrant its own dedicated post.

I’m a self-employed, solo developer, not very actively engaged in the WordPress “community” even though my work is 95% WordPress. So I have apparently missed the memo that shortcodes were (prior to yesterday’s release of WordPress 6.2.1, anyway) the way people were injecting PHP into their HTML-based Block Theme templates. (Silly me… I was just misusing Block Patterns to the same effect.)

Well… as it turns out, allowing shortcodes in Block Theme templates apparently was a security issue, which the WordPress core team summarily “fixed” by just outright removing shortcode support in templates in this update.

This change did break a pair of sites for me (which are still just in final testing, not live, and which I need to go fix as soon as I finish writing this), but the problem was relatively minor. It sounds like a lot of people are using shortcodes extensively as a backdoor hack for adding PHP functionality to templates, and they are… um… not happy.

At what point does the Gutenberg team collectively take a step back and realize that maybe they’ve been the ones Doing It Wrong™ all this time? I feel like that reckoning is approaching.