Stop wordpress from creating empty/null entries

Question

Fiddling around with a custom post type which is quite heavy modified. Started doing some testing to see if I had broken some function, and realized that wordpress doesn't have a function that checks if a post has any content at all. Meaning, if I press "Add new" and just press publish, it won't say a word just save the information in the database.

The problem is that it's not visible in the admin area, just in the database. An entry with the title Auto Draft and post status auto-draft is created.

This isn't the worlds biggest problem, but still I want to avoid to be creating unnecessary entries in the database.

So I wonder how I would go about to create some sort of function that checks if any data has been entered in the editor, and if it's blank it'll prompt the user to enter data before saving/publishing the post.

The publish meta looks like this:

 <?php
if ( !in_array( $post->post_status, array('publish', 'future', 'private') ) || 0 == $post->ID ) {?> 
    <input name="original_publish" type="hidden" id="original_publish" value="<?php esc_attr_e('Publish') ?>" />
    <?php submit_button( __( 'Create' ), 'primary', 'publish', false, array( 'tabindex' => '5', 'accesskey' => 'p' ) );
} else { ?>
    <input name="original_publish" type="hidden" id="original_publish" value="<?php esc_attr_e('Save') ?>" />
    <input name="save" type="submit" class="button-primary" id="publish" tabindex="5" accesskey="p" value="<?php esc_attr_e('Save') ?>" />
<?php } ?>

Answer 1

When i needed a solution to the save "problem" i create an Ajax function to validate the fields and did some minor JQuery hacks:

first we add our JavaScript to capture the submit/publish event and use it to submit our own ajax function before the actual submit

 add_action('wp_print_scripts','my_publish_admin_hook');

function my_publish_admin_hook(){
if (is_admin()){
        ?>
        <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
            jQuery(document).ready(function() {
                jQuery('#post').submit(function() {

                    var form_data = jQuery('#post').serializeArray();
                    form_data = jQuery.param(form_data);
                    var data = {
                        action: 'my_pre_submit_validation',
                        security: '<?php echo wp_create_nonce( 'pre_publish_validation' ); ?>',
                        form_data: form_data
                    };
                    jQuery.post(ajaxurl, data, function(response) {
                        if (response.indexOf('True') > -1 || response.indexOf('true') > -1 || response = true ||  response) {
                            jQuery('#ajax-loading').hide();
                            jQuery('#publish').removeClass('button-primary-disabled');
                            return true;
                        }else{
                            alert("please correct the following errors: " + response);
                            jQuery('#ajax-loading').hide();
                            jQuery('#publish').removeClass('button-primary-disabled');
                            return false;
                        }
                    });
                    return false;
                });
            });
        </script>
        <?php
    }
}

then we create the function to do the actual validation:

add_action('wp_ajax_my_pre_submit_validation', 'pre_submit_validation');
function pre_submit_validation(){
    //simple Security check
    check_ajax_referer( 'pre_publish_validation', 'security' );

    //do your validation here
    //all of the form fields are in $_POST['form_data'] array
    //and return true to submit: echo 'true'; die();
    //or your error message: echo 'bal bla bla'; die();
}

you can always change it up a bit to do the validation on the client side but i prefer on the server side.

Answer 2

realized that wordpress doesn't have a function that checks if a post has any content at all. Meaning, if I press "Add new" and just press publish, it won't say a word just save the information in the database.

This is incorrect. wp_insert_post() checks if post has content, title or excerpt. If all of these are empty then it returns WP_Error with message about empty content.

The problem is that it's not visible in the admin area, just in the database. An entry with the title Auto Draft and post status auto-draft is created.

This isn't the worlds biggest problem, but still I want to avoid to be creating unnecessary entries in the database.

From quick look at code auto-drafts should be cleaned up automatically.