Using wordpress shortcodes to render PHP - php

Question

I'm trying to create a shortcode to render custom php pages. I'm getting very odd behaviour which i'm not getting if I used a wordpress template.
For example. If i create a template with the code:
<article id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(); ?> <?php generate_article_schema( 'BlogPosting' ); ?>>
<div class="inside-article">
<?PHP $content = apply_filters( 'the_content', get_the_content() );
global $post;
$post_info = get_post($post->ID);
$content = $post_info->post_content;
$ind = strrpos($content, "/");
$page = substr($content, $ind+1);
$path = substr($content, 0, $ind+1);
$oldDir = getcwd();
chdir($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"].$path);
include($page);
chdir($oldDir);
?>
</div><!-- .inside-article -->
</article><!-- #post-## -->
Then in the wordpress page i simply enter the location of the file, e.g. /contact/contact_form.php. The contact_form.php page renders on the screen within the wordpress theme.
Now, i recently discovered shortcodes, and thought these would be a better way of rendering the php on the page. Instead of having the content of the page as /contact/contact_form.php I could have [custom_php filepath="/contact/contact_form.php"]
This is where i'm getting problems. The contact_form.php seems to have many require_once() functions all over the place, yet the variables wtihin them don't seem to exist, even though the first method (above) works fine.
For my shortcode code I have:
function subscribe_custom_php_shortcode($atts, $content = null) {
$atts = shortcode_atts(
array(
'filepath' => '/index.php'
), $atts);
$ind = strrpos($atts["file"], "/");
$page = substr($atts["file"], $ind+1);
$path = substr($atts["file"], 0, $ind+1);
$oldDir = getcwd();
chdir($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"].$path);
ob_start();
include($page);
$content = ob_get_clean();
chdir($oldDir);
return $content;
}
add_shortcode('custom_php', 'subscribe_custom_php_shortcode');
As you can see, the code is very similar except I added ob_start() and ob_get_clean() to get the results of the PHP based on someones comments. Removing these still doesn't seem to bring back the values of the require_conce within the contact_form.php.
What's interesting is if i change the require_once for include it works.
Any ideas?
Thanks

Answer 1

Assuming filepath is relative to theme directory, this should be the best way to include it...
function subscribe_custom_php_shortcode($atts, $content = null) {
$atts = shortcode_atts(
array(
'filepath' => '/index.php'
), $atts );
ob_start();
include get_stylesheet_directory() . $atts['filepath'];
$content = ob_get_clean();
return $content;
}
add_shortcode('custom_php', 'subscribe_custom_php_shortcode');
As you can see... we use the get_stylesheet_directory function to get the current theme directory.
Hope that helps 😉