Html forms in wordpress theme

Question

I have a form in tpl files and called the tpl in wordpress theme.so now the form is submitted to the theme file.

Can anyone tell me which way is the proper way for wordpress?

1.Getting the post values and pass the value to custom plugin function to process the db functionality.

2.Getting the post values and Process the db functionality in theme itself .

3.form action directly to the custom plugin function.

Thanks

Answer 1

Technically the best thing to do is to write a plugin that will also provide the template(you can of course allow the theme a way of overriding that - for instance by using locate_template( 'my-plugin-template.php' ) to check if the template exists in the current theme).

You should then process the form submission in your plugin - I would either check for the form values on the template_redirect action filter for instance(you can do it earlier as well - like on init for instance), or even right before loading the template if you don't need to do a redirect.

The idea behind using a plugin, vs putting all of the code in the theme is that if you decide to change your theme in the future, it would be more easy to keep the same functionality in the new theme as well.

I personally try to avoid calling plugin files directly(the third option you thought of) - not that it has any side-effects that I know of, but it's just my own preference.