Rob Barrett

Quick WordPress Tip: How to execute AND display PHP in posts and pages

Posted on March 7, 2009 at 4:51pm

Say you’ve got some PHP code that you need to run from within one of your Pages. For example, in my Portfolio page, I use the FlickrRSS plugin to pull in photos from my Flickr feed. While the easiest way to implement that would be to place the required PHP snippet in a template file, I wanted to be able to display Page content after the photos, so I needed a way to allow PHP code to run from within a Page.

That’s the first step, and it’s got an easy solution — just install the Exec-PHP plugin, and all PHP within Posts and Pages will run as you’d expect it to.

The second requirement I have for my blog is that, such as in this WordPress Tip, I want to display PHP code as part of a tutorial, within a <code> tag. Entering the PHP code as is will simply run it, which is no good. Perhaps you could replace the questions marks with ‘&#63;’ (the HTML code for the question mark character)? Elsewhere, that would be fine, but a <code> tag will display its contents exactly as you enter them, so you’d get that HTML code showing up.

The workaround I came up with is to install the Custom Fields Shortcodes plugin, which lets you display the contents of a Custom Field within a Page or a Post (I’ve gone into more detail in this post). Then you create a new custom field called, say, ‘PHP Example‘, and enter the code into it, replacing the question marks with the above HTML character.

<&#63;php echo "This is some PHP code" &#63;>

You can call this into your post with the [cf] plugin tag. So, in this example, you’d type:

<code>[cf]PHP Example[/cf]</code>

That will draw in the contents of the specified custom field, and show the code exactly as someone would need to enter it into their own code editor.

---