Multiple Selection Checkboxes

The challenge in your case is that the example is coming from the assumption of one group of checkboxes. But your case has multiple groups.

It really doesn’t make sense to apply an entire block of this code snippet for each of the checkbox groups – that would be inefficient for you to setup.

I need to think through this a little more to figure out a way to make it functional for your application.

I think I have a resolution for that, but I’m going to do some more testing on it.

I think you mean horizontal, since the current example would display vertically.

That is something that would be determined by the HTML you output. The example code is just one particular example of what you could do. Even though the code snippet has a comment in it that says “you don’t need to change anything past this…” that really just refers to setting up the example “as-is”. But I’ve commented the code beyond that so you can figure out what is going on in each step along the way and thus customize it beyond the example given.

If you look at the first function past that comment, my_checkbox_array(), this is the function that filters form row for the placeholder checkbox and replaces that with some HTML for the multi-select checkboxes. Going down into that function, you’ll see a comment that says “assemble the checkboxes” and this is where that HTML is put together.

There are two lines of that process. The first just determines if a given checkbox should be checked or not. The second is the one that you need to concern yourself with. This is putting the new output HTML into a variable called $output.

The example looks like this:

$output.= '<input name="' . $box_key . '[]" type="checkbox" id="' . $box_key . '" value="' . $key . '"' . $chked . ' /> ' . $val . ' <br />';

So it outputs an input tag, some text (with no tag), and a line break (
).

If you want things in-line (horizontal display), the easy thing to do would be just eliminate the line break. However, you need a little more control to get things presented well, so it may be advantageous to wrap each of these with a tag you could give a class to and apply some CSS (such as margins, padding, etc). I would use a span for that rather than a div, which would still allow these all on one line without additional CSS for that. So adding a span before that input tag and closing it at the end in place of the line break would make that line look like this:

$output.= '<span class="multicheck"><input name="' . $box_key . '[]" type="checkbox" id="' . $box_key . '" value="' . $key . '"' . $chked . ' /> ' . $val . '</span>';

I gave my example span a class “multicheck” that I could then use to apply some CSS for adjusting margins/padding between the choices, such as:

.multicheck { margin-right: 6px; }

There’s not a “one-size-fits-all” example, so in order to get this to lay out well, you’ll need to figure out what kind of HTML and CSS you need in your particular application, but this generalization would be a “one-size-fits-most” and should give most users the information they need to further their customization of the example.

A couple of things about that message: First, it is a “notice” so it only shows if you are running with debug mode turned on, or you have PHP’s messaging set to a level of showing all messages – neither of these two things should you do on a production site.

The issue arises if you have a comma at the end of the list of values for a dropdown list. I can see that the code could probably be improved to avoid this, but you can resolve it by editing any dropdown fields and look at the values, make sure the last value does not have a comma at the end.

Sorry for the delayed response – I missed this somehow. Currently, no, there is not a hook in the process that we can use for when a new user is created via the admin.

I don’t want my code to be overwritten during updates of the WordPress files or other plugins.

I don’t want that to happen either! 😉

The place you generally want to put custom code is in your theme’s functions.php file. (Side note: you should be using a child theme for customizing the theme and you should use the functions.php in the child.)

There is a section of the site called “Basics” with a number of posts on WordPress best practices such as the functions.php and using a child theme. Hopefully those give you some helpful guidance. If you need more info on those topics definitely ask – you can either use the forum or contact me directly.

I’m not sure why you are unable to see previous replies. I double checked your login and you are enabled for forum access. You should be able to see the entire thread at the bottom of the post and also in the forum. If you can’t see the entire thread in either of those locations, let me know.

Any time you have a field that is used in a specific instance and not another, you have to consider how it is handled when it is needed but also when it is not. That sounds a little weird, but that’s the gist of it.

The trick here is that the handling for multiple selection checkboxes do currently revolve around a placehoder checkbox field that you essentially convert into a multi select. And unlike slipping in a “regular” field, there are several additional functions that have to be considered.

It may be an issue of using is_page() for checking that you are on the page this is being used on:

if ( is_page( 'the_page_slug' ) ) {
     //... 
}

Hope that helps