How do I call a template for the shortcode

First of all – Good morning 🙂 (its night time over in New Zealand)

I guess the closing quotes was just a typo when completing the post.
After posting this I added a help=1 option to the short code and this appeared:

Shortcode:
[summarize-posts offset="" orderby="menu_order" orderby_custom="" order="ASC" post_type="bio" taxonomy="post_tag" taxonomy_term="farm" tpl="wp-content/themes/fastfood-child/bios.tpl" help=1]

Relevant part of response:

Summarize Posts
Errors
There were no errors.
Warnings
Search parameters ignored: search_term and search_columns must be set.
Notices

Filtering on direct column/value: tpl: = wp-content/themes/fastfood-child/bios.tpl

Execution Time
0.01 seconds
Arguments
orderby: menu_order
order: ASC
post_type: Array (bio)
omit_post_type: Array (revision, nav_menu_item)
post_status: Array (publish, inherit)
taxonomy: post_tag
taxonomy_term: Array (farm)
taxonomy_depth: 1
search_columns: Array (post_title, post_content)
join_rule: AND
match_rule: contains
date_column: post_modified
tpl: wp-content/themes/fastfood-child/bios.tpl

Its that line, “Filtering on direct column/value” that is worrying me.

Maybe a cup of espresso will help clear things up ? 🙂

Thanks for your help.
Regards
David Latham

OK – I think I have it resolved. I had to edit your code. Never a good thing for me because when you update the plugin, my edits will all be gone. But it’s that important to me.

After much inserting of var_dump($blah); exit; lines I figured out what was happening.

The changes I made are as follows:

1. In the get posts function I included a block to unset $raw_args[‘tpl’] as follows (just after the block that unsets the help option… 🙂 :

//added code to unset tpl from raw_args so it's not used in filter.
        if (isset($raw_args['tpl']) ) {
            unset($raw_args['tpl']);
        }

2. I had to change the test order for the template. So the heirachy is: if there is a template argument, try to use it. If not or it fails to load the template then look for the $content value. If that’s not provided then use the default or if it is provided, read it and parse the bit between the open and close shortcode.

Here is the new function:

//------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    //! Private functions
    //------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    /**
     * Get the template (tpl) to format each search result.
     *
     * @param string  $content
     * @param array   $args    associative array
     * @return string
     * EDIT - DAVID LATHAM - Changed order of test for empty(content) and
     *                       empty(args[tpl])
     */
    private static function _get_tpl($content, $args) {
        $content = trim($content);
        if( !empty($args['tpl']) ) {
            // strip possible leading slash
            $args['tpl'] = preg_replace('/^\//', '', $args['tpl']);
            $file = ABSPATH .$args['tpl'];

            if ( file_exists($file) ) {
                $content = file_get_contents($file);
            }
            else {
                // TODO: throw an error
            }
        }
        elseif ( empty($content) ) {
            $content = self::result_tpl; // default
        }
        // Read from between [summarize-posts]in between[/summarize-posts]
        else {
            $content = html_entity_decode($content);
            // fix the quotes back to normal
            $content = str_replace(array('”', '“'), '"', $content );
            $content = str_replace(array('‘', '’'), "'", $content );
        }
        return $content;
    }

Maybe you want to give this some review time, and possibly include it in your next update? Otherwise – I will have to stick with this version or update your next update to suite…

I really like the idea of handing out this short code to the editors and having the template take care of itself. Maybe it’s something we could load into the database even from the manager side. But that’s for another rainy day. I don’t care about it ***THAT*** much.. 🙂

Regards
David Latham

Have raised issue on google code wiki here:
http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-custom-content-type-manager/issues/detail?id=427

Marking this thread as resolved.