WordPress blog posts likes to use curly quotes instead of straight quotes whenever you write an article.     Our documentation site is built on WordPress which means many of our articles are replaced any quotes we type in an article with curly quotes.

The problem is that the WordPress shortcode processor does NOT like curly quotes.   If you use curly quotes in a shortcode attribute such as [slp_directory by=”city”] and those quotes are “curly”, WordPress treats the quotes as a plain-old alphabetic character just like the C-I-T or Y in “city”.   In other words WordPress things you mean “by quote-city-quote” not “by city”.

Why is that an issue?

If you copy-and-paste most examples from this documentation site WordPress will copy the “pretty curly quotes” into your shortcode.     If you paste that into your WordPress page it breaks.

An example of how this can impact Store Locator Plus can be seen from my example where I pasted the slp_directory shortcode directly from the docs site into my test site.    I get an invalid data query because WordPress added curly-quotes to my data field name.    The SLP database does not have a field name quotesl_storequote but does have a field named sl_store.

The fix?

Make sure you re-type each quote manually.  Typing the ” in your blog instead of copy-and-paste will ensure you are getting “straight quotes” in your shortcode attributes not curly quotes.

This is how the example looks now that the curly quotes have been replaced with straight quotes.