Custom forms + Polylang

Question

I am new to Wordpress but I have some knowledge of PHP. I am creating a bilingual site (with Polylang) which has many forms. Some of them are handled by Contact Form 7 but some others have to be custom made.

So, the first form I made was quite a disaster - it works but under certain circumstances.

In the archives page of a custom post I insert

<form method="post" action="<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ); ?>">
<input type="hidden" name="post_type" value="myvalue">
<select class="form-control"  name="k" id="k">
<?php  
for($i=0;$i<2;$i++){?>
<option value="<?php echo $array3[$i]?>"><?php echo $array3[$i];?></option>
<?php }?>   
</select>
<span class="input-group-btn">
<button class="btn btn-search" type="submit"><i class="fa fa-search">  </i></button>
</span>
</form> 

I created a template file named mysearchresults.php In there I inserted the essential (between them)

 echo $_POST['k'];
 echo "Hello world";   

I created a page having as template mysearchresults.php in one language (named mysearchresults) and another in the other language (same template) named mysearchresults-2.

Loading the two pages gives a page with the Hello world printed.

Adding

<form method="post" action="<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ); ?>mysearchresults-2">

gives 404 (when I press the submit button - having made a selsction) - the same as instead of -2 I put mysearchresults. Putting mysearchresults.php gives the same error.

So I tried another approach, instead of

<select class="form-control"  name="k" id="k"> 

I put

<select class="form-control"  name="s" id="s">

and for action I left

action="<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ); ?>">  

In the search page I put echo $_POST['s'] and it loads the search results page printing the value of my selection.

What am I doing wrong? How can I have a custom form, pass the values in my action file and make operations on them? Why leaving like this the action label it loads the search results page?

Answer 1

for the action label, there are some reserved terms, that wordpress uses internally. so you should avoid this terms (specially true in http_post ot get requests). 's' stands for search, that's why the output is a search result page. here you can find reserved terms: https://codex.wordpress.org/Reserved_Terms

If you need very simple forms (so it seems in this case), i would suggest you to learn how to append variables to an url with add_query_arg. Here's a good place to start, it's quite simple and ready to use : https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/add_query_arg/

Answer 2

You can also look at the polylang extension for contact form 7. It allows you to manage multiple forms in different languages using the familiar polylang translator management tools.