Tip: The minimum content action extension

In this post I will show how to create the minimum content action extension.

The 'content/action' view is commonly used to process forms - while eZ Publish does a lot of validation, you may want to customise this.

Let's create our folder structure inside extension folder first:

• minaction
  • settings
  • actions

Then let's define that this extension has actions by creating the minaction/settings/content.ini.append.php file:

<?php /* #?ini charset="utf-8"?
 *
[ActionSettings]
ExtensionDirectories[]=minaction
 
 */
?>

Also we need to create the php action handler for this extension, so we create the minaction/actions/content_actionhandler.php file:

<?php
 
function minaction_ContentActionHandler(&$module, &$http,
        &$objectID ) {
 
    if ($http->hasPostVariable("hello" ) ) {
        echo $http->postVariable("hello");
        eZExecution::cleanExit();
 
    }
    return;
}
?>
 

In administrator user interface, click 'setup' tab->'extensions' menu, select 'minaction', click button 'Apply Changes', click button 'Regenerate autoload arrays for extensions'. Clear the cache.

Finally you need to edit one template somewhere and create a form with one field named 'hello', as our extension check if the submited form has one variable named 'hello':

<form action={"content/action"|ezurl} method="post">
 
<input name="hello" type="submit" value="Hello Action!" />

</form>

Then when you submit the form, the php code of our extension will be called some time, and we will check if the submited form to the content/action view has some variables and do something.