Hi Everyone

I'm trying to add functionality to Piwigo by modifying an existing plugin but I'm having some difficulty and am hoping for some help.

The feature to add: I need a feature that is a button, just below the image caption that, when clicked, presents a popup form that the user can use to email a link to the current picture to a friend.  It'd be like 'share via email'.

The how: Because such a plugin seems non-existent (correct me if I'm wrong), I chose to try and modify the ContactForm plugin.  It contains the necessary code, more or less, and the progress is kind of working.  Using CSS and changing the html tag id's I've gotten some degree of popup functionality.  I'm sure I can get there rest in time.

Here is where I am stuck: The button.  The ContactForm has its own page.  I need to take that HTML (or smarty template) and inject that just below the current picture being displayed in the template called 'picture.tpl' ('m using the theme bootstrap_darkroom) so that the html and php are rendered and I can hide/show that with my CSS.  I know php can do this injection, but I'm having difficulty getting it to work.  This confusion is confounded by the template system and the events/action system of Piwigo. 

In the ContactForm plugin, I have tried to change the event that seems to call the page to be rendered to instead render on 'render_element_description', like so:

add_event_handler('render_element_description', 'my_function');
function my_function($template)
{
//add it here
  return $template; //<-- NOTE: this is how you return the value to Piwigo
}

the idea being that within this php function, I would tell the $template to {include} the ContactForm template.  The thing is, I feel like I'm in the ballpark, but way off-base.

I hope all that makes sense and I'm looking forward to your help.  Apologies too for lengthiness.  This is actually the very first time in my life I've posted any forum topic.  (Yes, really). 

Thanks, All.

Piwigo version: 2.9.1
PHP version: 5.6.30
MySQL version: 5.5.51-38.2

Last edited by cgcarter (2017-08-11 02:29:55)