Friday, November 25, 2011

How to create a custom insert tags for Contao

The Contao cms supports dynamic content integration through the so called "insert-tags". Contao has a lot of built in "insert-tags" but sometimes when writing custom extensions may be the need to create a custom one.

Our custom “insert tags”

For the purpose of this tutorial we will create an extension for Contao that that provides two “insert tags” in order to display:

  • The ip address of the visitor when called as {{mytag::ip_address}}
  • The current page title when called as {{mytag::page_title}}

please note that the above functionalities are provided by the default {{env::ip}} and {{env::page_title}} “insert tags”.

Prepare the directory structure And files

Create the following files and directory under TL_ROOT/system/modules

[D]: directory - [F]: file
----------------------------------------------
[D] my_inserttags/
[D] config/
[F] config.php
[F] MyInsertTags.php


Let’s start


Contao provides the insert-tags functionality through the replaceInsertTags hook, so the creation of a custom "insert tags" is a simple two step operation:


Step 1:


Put the following code into my_inserttags/config/config.php


<?php
$GLOBALS['TL_HOOKS']['replaceInsertTags'][] = array('MyInsertTags', 'outputTagContent');
?>

Step 2:


Put the following code into my_inserttags/MyInsertTags.php


<?php

class MyInsertTags extends Controller {


public function outputTagContent($strTag) {

/**
* we need to run our function only if the $strTag argument is one of:
* mytag::ip_address
* or
* mytag::page_title
*/

$arrParts = explode('::', $strTag);

/**
* returning false means that our function can not recognize the tag
* so Contao will try if the next hook applies
*/

if ($arrParts[0] != 'mytag') {
return false;
}

switch ($arrParts[1]) {

case 'ip_address':

/**
* here goes the code that match our mytag::ip_address tag
*/

return $this->Environment->ip;
break;
case 'page_title':

/**
* here goes the code that match our mytag::page_title tag
*/

return $GLOBALS['objPage']->pageTitle;
break;
}

/**
* mytag::something is still an unrecognized tag
*/

return false;
}
}
?>


We are done


Our estension is ready to run. We can test it by creating a content element through the Contao backend and put the following lines in it:



You ip address is: {{mytag::ip_address}}

The page title is: {{mytag::page_title}}

If you have questions or comments do not hesitate to comment below.

5 comments:

  1. Thank you for this article. It helped me a lot.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It works great!! Thank you very much!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great information about insert tags. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Easy understanding
    Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi... I read your post, its very helpful for me,,, Thanks for sharing this informative post..

    ReplyDelete