How to code custom submit form in php in wordpress

Today I got an sms from my friend regarding some query related to wordpress custom form coding (through plugin or theme directly) . Although i am sleepy while writing this post, I will try to be as much descriptive as I can. Do let me know if anything in the tutorial is ambiguous.

The question that i was asked said How to code custom submit form in php in wordpress. According to him he used these keywords in google to find his solution but failed (ofcourse! :p)

• action=” wordpress”
• wordpress theme
• form wordpress
• how to create a contact form in wordpress
• contact form php wordpress

Yeah i know these keywords wouldn’t have ever yielded the desired search results :D Anyway, let me explain the code here.

Query:

If we need to create a form in wordpress (using plugin or page – by using a separate custom coded theme file for that page) then how can we check if the page is freshly loaded or if the form has been submitted or not (I hope the scenario makes some sense! :p) Here i will explain the solution while keeping focus on using all code on one page / file. However the same base can be used to create it on multiple pages and files (separate file for fresh page load and if the form is submitted)

Solution:

The solution of this query includes following steps:

1. Create a new page in wordpress admin panel

Create a new page for wordpress installation. No need to add any content to the page. Just add the title.

2. Create a custom theme file for the page

Goto your theme directory ( wp-content/themes/YOUR_THEME ). We will be adding all the code related to form and its php server side to this new page in this separate custom theme file. Goto wordpress admin and edit that page and assign this new theme file for that new wordpress page.

3. Add form code to the custom theme file

Now we will add the form code to the main body part of the custom theme file that we created for our new page. The for part is simple. Something like this:

<form id="formid" action="" method="POST">
  <input type="text" name="inputname" value="" />
  <input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit" />
</form>

Remember to add id to all the fields and method to the form. I used POST method but you can use any method you want to (POST or GET)

Also note that the action is equal to blank. (action=””) What does it do? well it simply submits the page to itself. As i stated earlier that i will be focusing on using all code on a single file / page so we will submit the form to the same page.

4. Php code to deal with submitted data:

Ok i will try to be as simple as i can over here but i apologize if it gets complicated (which it shouldn’t)

On the theme custom theme we will a bunch of php code. We can add the code anywhere on the theme file but above the form code that we added in the previous file.

First of all the code will check if the form has been submitted or it’s the fresh load of the page:

if($_POST['submit']) {
  // we will add the code to process submitted form here
    // we can also echo some text here if form is submitted
}

You can use simple php to evaluate and process the submitted data from the form (checked via submit id of the form).

5. Hide form if form is submitted

In case if you want to show the form only to the fresh and first load of the page and hide once it’s submitted (e.g in contact form)

To achieve this, we will simply combine the php code that we used to deal with the submitted data of the form and the form code itself. We can do it like this:

<?php
  if($_POST['submit']) {
    // we will add the code to process submitted form here
    // we can also echo some text here if form is submitted
  } else { ?>
    <form id="formid" action="" method="POST">
      <input type="text" name="inputname" value="" />
      <input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit" />
    </form>
  <?php } ?>

This way the code will first check if the form has been submitted and if it’s done then it runs your custom php code to evaluate the data submitted via the form to the same page. In case there is no form submitted (which means no $_POST[‘submit’] ) it will show the code in the else container, that is the form code itself.

Let me know if you have any query related to this article or any other topic.

    //

You can see an example using this type of code here: PHP form submit

You might also like

• WordPress Plugin error – Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cache limiter – headers already sent (output started at / . . . (3)
• Remove » from WordPress title tag (2)
• Convert string variable characters to ASCII codes using PHP (2)