Content that loads after the share
Blurlock has been on this site since July 2013. The original wrapped a shortcode around a paragraph and blurred it until the visitor pressed a Facebook Like, a retweet or a Google +1 button. Two of those three buttons no longer exist, which tells you how long ago that was. The 2.0 on this page is new code, written in 2026 for WordPress 7 and PHP 8, with the same idea and a different mechanism underneath.
How it works now
Wrap a download link, a coupon code, the second half of a tutorial or any set of blocks in the Blurlock block (it uses InnerBlocks, so anything goes inside). Visitors see blurred placeholder bars, a short message and share buttons for Facebook, X, LinkedIn and email, any mix per locker. When they click one, the share window opens, the page waits four seconds and then asks a REST endpoint for the real content, which loads in place. A first-party cookie remembers it for the number of days you set, so later page loads render the content straight away.
The part we care about most: the locked content is never sent to the browser until the share happens. It is not hidden with CSS and it is not in the page source, so view-source shows nothing. The endpoint checks a token derived from the post ID and the locker’s position, confirms the post is published, public and not password protected, then re-renders that locker’s inner content through the normal content filters and returns it.
Settings and placement
Under Settings, Blurlock you set the default title, text, networks, duration and button colour once; every locker can override its title, text and networks. Classic editor users get [blurlock title="Locked" networks="facebook,x"]hidden content[/blurlock]. Several lockers can sit in one post, and lockers nested inside other blocks are found.
- Logged-in editors see the content when previewing
- Feeds are never locked
- Caching plugins are fine: the locked page is identical for everyone, and the cookie only changes what one visitor sees later
- No tracking, no external scripts, no accounts
The honest limit
No site can verify that a share actually happened. The networks do not report it back, so like every social locker ever made, Blurlock works on the honour system: a visitor who opens the share window and closes it will still get the content after the delay. What Blurlock does guarantee is that nobody reads it without going through the buttons, because it is simply not there to read. On a block theme the content renders before the usual script hook fires, which bit us during testing; the script is registered on init now, so it works on block and classic themes alike.
