How to 'embed' a template from within a plugin

Question

In a plugin is it possible to output the equivalent of {embed="my_template"} if a certain condition is met?

My site index file is as follows at the moment, with php enabled and set to input:

<?php
// Define segment one variable
$seg1 = $this->EE->uri->segment(1);

// If this is the homepage, embed the homepage template
if($seg1 == "") { ?>{embed="embeds/homepage"}<?php 
    } else {

    // IF NOT HOMEPAGE, DO THIS...
    if(substr($seg1, 0, 11) == "property-in") // if first 11 characters = 'property-in'
    {
        ?>{embed="embeds/property-in-town" url_title="<?php $seg1;?>"}<?php
    } else {
        ?>{embed="embeds/town-property" url_title="<?php $seg1;?>"}<?php
    }
}

So what I'd like to do is move this to a plugin and avoid having php turned on.

Cheers

Jim

Answer 1

You probably don't need to build your own plugin for this. If that logic is all you have to worry about then Switchee and a couple of regular expressions are all you need.

{exp:switchee variable="{segment_1}" parse="inward"}

    {!-- Seg 1 = empty. Embed homepage template. --}
    {case value="''"}
        {embed="embeds/homepage"}
    {/case}

    {!-- Seg 1 starts with 'property-in'. Embed property-in-town template. --}
    {case value="#^property-in#"}
        {embed="embeds/property-in-town" url_title="{segment_1}"}
    {/case}

    {!-- Seg 1 is something else. Embed town-property template. --}
    {case default="yes"}
        {embed="embeds/town-property" url_title="{segment_1}"}
    {/case}

{/exp:switchee}

You probably don't need to pass the url_title embed vars either, as you can always use {segment_1} within the embedded templates anyway.

Answer 2

The Template class allows you to work with template data from inside a plugin, but I don't think it lets you do it in the way you're suggesting.

As far as I know, you can't directly ask a plugin to embed something, because it's working at a different level of the render stack than where you would normally call the {embed} tag. What you can do is use the template class to render HTML, depending on what's inside the plugin tags, but that's as close as you can get, I think.

If I read your code correctly, it seems you're trying to do some kind of URL routing. In which case, I'd hazard a guess you could probably achieve what you want by taking advantage of EE's built in routing. You could make a group called 'property-in', and then use the URL segments such as {segment_1} or {segment_2} to define which URL you want to get to.

for example: /property-in/town

If you really want to use the substring function, you'd be better off installing a plugin like phpstringfun, which allows you to call functions like substr() from inside EE without PHP enabled in your templates. That seems like it would be less overhead for what you seem to want to get done.

Answer 3

What I would be tempted to do is to slightly change the logic, keeping the embeds in the template - but using a plugin to do the conditionals:

$seg = $this->EE->uri->segment(1);

if ($seg=='')
{
    return 'home';
}
elseif (substr($seg,0,11)=='property-in')
{
    return 'in-town';
}
else
{
    return 'property';
}

Then just use something like switchee, or even a series of conditionals to display the appropriate embed:

{if "{exp:plugin}"=="home"}
    {embed="embeds/homepage"}
{/if}
{if "{exp:plugin}"=="in-town"}
    {embed="embeds/property-in-town"}
{/if}
{if "{exp:plugin}"=="property"}
    {embed="embeds/town-property"}
{/if}

Answer 4

If you really want to 'embed' a template from a plugin, you need to create an instance of the Template library to do the heavy lifting.

Add this class at the bottom of your plugin file (outside of the plugin class) or create a different file for it and include it in the plugin file.

if ( ! class_exists('Inline_template'))
{
  if ( ! class_exists('EE_Template'))
  {
    require APPPATH.'libraries/template.php';
  }

  class Inline_template extends EE_Template
  {
    function fetch_template($template_group, $template, $show_default = TRUE, $site_id = '')
    {
        if ($template_group == '!inline')
        {
            return $template;
        }
        else    
        {
            return parent::fetch_template($template_group, $template, $show_default, $site_id);
        }
    }
  }  
}

And then in your plugin code itself:

$this->EE->TMPL->run_template_engine('embeds', 'homepage');
return $this->EE->TMPL->parse_variables_row($this->EE->TMPL->final_template, array(), true);

This should do the trick.

– Wouter