I was recently auditing a custom theme for a high-traffic WooCommerce store—doing about 5k transactions a day—and the template files were a complete eyesore. Every single line was cluttered with the full <?php echo esc_html( $var ); ?> syntax. It wasn’t just ugly; it made scanning for logic errors a total nightmare. When you’re dealing with hundreds of template overrides, readability isn’t a luxury; it’s a safety feature.
For years, the WordPress coding standards have strictly forbidden the use of the PHP short echo tag. The reasoning was sound: before PHP 5.4, that tag could be disabled in the server configuration. If a developer used it and the site moved to a host where short_open_tag was off, the code would literally leak out as plain text on the frontend. I remember a project back in 2013 where I spent an entire weekend manually “fixing” these tags in a legacy plugin just to get it through a linter, only to realize I’d accidentally deleted a closing brace in the process. It was a waste of energy for a problem that was already becoming obsolete.
Why the WordPress coding standards are changing
The reality is that PHP has evolved. Since version 5.4, the short echo tag <?= is always available, regardless of your php.ini settings. Since WordPress now requires at least PHP 7.2 (and many of us are pushing for 8.0+), the old security argument is dead. A recent proposal on the official Make WordPress Core blog—specifically at [https://make.wordpress.org/core/2025/12/05/coding-standard-proposal-allow-the-use-of-the-php-short-echo-tag/]—is finally moving to allow these tags for single statements. This is a massive win for developer happiness.
Trust me on this: this change isn’t about laziness. It’s about reducing the signal-to-noise ratio in our templates. When you have a single variable to output, the shorthand is cleaner and less prone to typing errors. Here is how it looks in practice:
<?php
/**
* Example of the bbioon_display_price function.
*/
?>
<div class="bbioon-price">
<?= bbioon_get_formatted_price( $product_id ); ?>
</div>The proposal is pragmatic. It doesn’t force everyone to go back and rewrite existing core files. That would be a recipe for disaster and massive merge conflicts. Instead, it just stops penalizing developers for using a feature that has been standard in the PHP community for over a decade. It’s a “live and let live” approach for new official themes and patches.
Managing standards in your own projects
If you’re like me and you manage a team, you might still want to enforce strict rules for consistency. If you aren’t ready to let the short echo tag into your codebase, you can actually keep it forbidden by tweaking your PHPCS configuration. You just add a specific rule to your phpcs.xml file to keep the linter on its toes. Total control, no drama.
- The short open tag
<?is still forbidden (and should be). - The short echo tag
<?=is only for single statements. - Existing core code stays as-is to avoid breaking things.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast when you’re managing legacy systems and modern standards simultaneously. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work with clean, modern code, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
Are you planning to switch to shorthand echo tags in your next project, or are you staying with the full syntax for the sake of habit?
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