How to place php inside php

Question

Yes, this is similar to Can you put PHP inside PHP with echo?, but not identical and I would like to actually find a solution or a way to accomplish this.

Surely, there must be a way to show content to specific user groups within a template...

I have a wordpress menu that I'd like to only display to users with a set role.

I use this code to display my menu:

<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'max_mega_menu_1' ) ); ?>

But the problem is that I need to use a snippet like the one below to execute opening and closing shortcodes to hide the menu from everyone else:

<?php
    $menu = "my menu code here";
    echo do_shortcode("[um_show_content roles='um_efa-pack'] ". $menu ." [/um_show_content]");
?>

How can I come up with a way of getting my original menu code within that PHP variable? I've been looking, but I can't find a good solution and I'm not even sure what to search for anymore.

If it helps, there is also a shortcode for the menu, but that would also require PHP to execute, no?

[maxmegamenu location=max_mega_menu_1]

Answer 1

Take a look at Output Control, specifically Output Buffering.

If you need PHP output as a variable, it's an invaluable tool that's really easy to use.

<?php
    /* Turn on Output Buffering, effectively 'pausing'
     * all PHP output, putting it in a buffer instead.
     */
    ob_start();

    /* Output/Display the menu. Since we started Output
     * Buffering, it won't actually display yet - instead
     * it gets added to the buffer.
     */
    wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'max_mega_menu_1' ) );

    /* Dump the buffer into a variable, and turn off
     * the Output Buffer so we can start actually sending
     * output to the client again.
     */
    $menu = ob_get_clean();

    /* Now use the shortcode as you would normally, since
     * $menu contains the HTML markup from the nav menu and
     * Output Buffering has been turned off with ob_get_clean()
     */
    echo do_shortcode( '[um_show_content roles="um_efa-pack"]'. $menu .'[um_show_content]' );
?>

I couldn't speak to the embedding a shortcode inside a shortcode, as it depends on how each of those shortcodes was built. Some don't integrate very well together, especially ones with enclosed content. Though, it may not hurt to try simply using them:

echo do_shortcode( '[um_show_content roles="um_efa-pack"][maxmegamenu location="max_mega_menu_1"][/um_show_content]' );

---

It looks like you're using a plugin (um?) to handle this. Natively in WordPress it would as simple as checking the user's role using current_user_can() or comparing against the current User's Roles

$user = wp_get_current_user();
if( in_array( 'whatever-role', (array) $user->roles ) ){
    // Has the role, show first menu
    wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'max_mega_menu_1' ) );
} else {
    // Doesn't have the role, show second menu
    wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'max_mega_menu_2' ) );
}