WordPress: how to handle page redirects in shortcodes

This is just a quick tip, something that I faced a while ago while working on a client’s website.
I had to develop a shortcode responsible to render a form and obviously after the submission I wanted to redirect the user to another url (following the POST/redirect/GET pattern).

It may seem easy but using something like wp_redirect directly in the shortcode rendering block may cause errors like this:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by ...

One possible (and very easy) solution is to register a function for the template_redirect hook and handle everything there. Something like this:

class my_shortcode{
public function __construct()
{
add_shortcode('my_shortcode', array($this, 'render_form'));
add_action( 'template_redirect', array($this, 'handle_form_post') );
}
function render_form(){
// guess what goes there 😀
}
function handle_form_post(){
if ( isset( $_POST[''my_shortcode_form_name'] ) ) {
$dest_url = 'set your url';
wp_redirect($dest_url);
exit;
}
}
}
</p>

view raw
wp_shortcode_redirect.php
hosted with ❤ by GitHub

</p>

of course don’t forget to create an instance of the class!

	class my_shortcode{

	public function __construct()
	{
	add_shortcode('my_shortcode', array($this, 'render_form'));

	add_action( 'template_redirect', array($this, 'handle_form_post') );
	}

	function render_form(){
	// guess what goes there 😀
	}

	function handle_form_post(){
	if ( isset( $_POST[''my_shortcode_form_name'] ) ) {
	$dest_url = 'set your url';
	wp_redirect($dest_url);
	exit;
	}
	}
	}

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