What action hook can I use to add a JavaScript to a page post using a theme template that is not including get_header() nor get_footer()?

Question

So the reason why I am don't want to include get_header() or get_footer() tags is because this page will be loaded as an iframe using the thickbox modal plugin and its content will be a form and I don't want the aforementioned tags to render all the menus and banner images and menus as well as the footer content because it will make for lots of scrolling on this page.

However, current I'm running something like this:

add_action('template_redirect', 'my_plugin_add_js');

However, when I take out the get_header() and get_footer() tags then the JavaScript doesn't load even though the javascripts inside the 'my_plugin_add_js' are being added within the body HTML tags at the end and not inside the head tags, like so:

wp_register_script("validate_form", plugins_url('js/my_plugin_validate_form.js', __FILE__), array('jquery', 'validation'), '1.0', true);

So I gather that the 'template_redirect' action hook is not the right one to use.

Answer 1

Completely skipping wp_head and wp_footer doesn't seem like a good idea, many core components and plugins depend on these hooks. Instead, you could create a light header and footer, and load them via an extra argument to get_header() and get_footer(). get_header( 'light' ) will load header-light.php instead of the regular header file. Create one without the visual header of the other pages, but leave the wp_head action intact.

Answer 2

It's not about hook you use to set up queue (although you should use wp_enqueue_scripts instead but what you are doing will break that as well), it's that by removing header and footer you are also removing wp_head and wp_footer hooks that (among many other things) handle output of queued scripts.

If your template is that minimal it is probably easiest to explicitly echo your script with wp_print_scripts() (pass your script's handle).

Answer 3

Have you considered using a Conditional Tag?

For example:

<?php if(is_page('your-page-name')) { ?>
//inlcude script here
<?php } ?>

More on Conditional Statements: http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags