Question

I want to create my own plugin, but I have no idea how to handle a form.

For example I have this code from the twitter-stream plugin’s settings page:

<form action="<?php echo str_replace( '%7E', '~', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>" method="post">
    <label for="consumerkey" style="font-weight:bold;display:block;width:150px;">Consumer Key:</label> <input type="text" value="" id="consumerkey" name="consumerkey" />
    <label for="consumersecret" style="font-weight:bold;display:block;width:150px;margin-top:5px;">Consumer Secret:</label> <input type="text" value="" id="consumersecret" name="consumersecret" />
    <input type="submit" value="Save" style="display:block;margin-top:10px;" />
</form>

I can’t understand this:

action="php echo str_replace( '%7E', '~', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])"

I’ve read many books on PHP and only saw this:

action="somescript.php" for the URL.

I just don’t know where to put the code that handles my form.

Can I just put my code in the plugin’s php file (called scheduler.php, located in wordpress/wp-content/plugins/scheduler/scheduler.php)?

Also, show me some examples of how to handle the form in wordpress please.

By the way, I just need two fields on my settings page: username and password, and I’d want the field’s content to be stored in the database when the admin presses submit button.

And I still can’t understand how

action="php echo str_replace( '%7E', '~', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])"

is converted to

action="/sheduled/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=twitterstreamauth" 

Sorry my English is not very good. Thank you very much for your attention.

Answer 1

By googling %7E, I found that it’s a reserved code in Unix, representing a tilde (~). Because lots of servers run Unix Operating Systems, you can’t use the symbol %7E. You can however use the symbol ~ which may be used in a web address or somewhere on the page.

php echo str_replace( '%7E', '~', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) takes the string stored in $_SERVER (which is a special array) from the key named REQUEST_URI. It then replaces every occurence of %7E with ~. In maybe 99% of the cases, no symbols are replaced but there still might be a chance of a tilde in the url. It’s quite trivial but echo echoes the edited string.

In this case, the string /sheduled/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=twitterstreamauth is returned by $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], the symbol %7E is not found so the string is just echoed into the html code.

The action="..." is the action the browser needs to execute when the form is submitted, in this case open the file options-general.php?page=twitterstreamauth

Also, if you don’t know how to store the contents of a form into the database, you haven’t read enough PHP books. You’d need to learn PHP + MySQL to store something in a database.

I hope this helps you understand the code a bit better.