# Shortcode Overview

# Overview

Shortcodes allows the user to enhance the functionality of their site and gives them the ability to create special features that will distinguishes their site from the competition. Solodev shortcodes are the contextual templating language of Solodev. With a templating language, users are able to code directly against their site content – allowing developers and content editors to work in tandem.

Similar to other templating, Solodev uses double brackets [] to open and close templated expressions and double curly braces for HTML fields. Inside these brackets a developer can use shortcode functions and reference content schema properties. These templating expressions are written alongside standard HTML.

This framework enables developers to create special kinds of content and functionality that users can attach to certain pages by adding the corresponding shortcode into the page text. Shortcodes handle all of the tricky parsing eliminating the need for writing a custom regular expression for each shortcode. Helper functions are included for setting and fetching default attributes. This framework supports both self-closing and enclosing shortcodes.