WordPress Conditional Content

How to use

You can place conditional content between if shortcodes, and use its attributes to define conditions. The content between the shortcodes will only be displayed if all defined conditions are met.

Defining conditions

Conditions are defined by setting the attributes of the shortcode in the following format:

[if <type>=<condition>]
 Conditional content
[/if]

A basic example:

[if qs="product-type:shoes"]
 Thank you for buying shoes
[/if]

The text in this example will only be displayed if the current URL has a GET paramater of “product-type” with the value “shoes”.

Available condition types are:

• qs – Match on the key/value pair of the defined query string/GET parameter. Query string conditions are formatted like this:

  [if qs="<qskey>:<qsvalue>"] … [/if]
  
  qskey is the name of the query string variable and `qsvalue` the value to test for. For example, the condition `qs="product-type:2"` will match `?product-type=2`.
  

• referrer – To check on the current referrer. The condition will be true if HTTP_REFERER contains <value>. The match doesn’t need to be exact, so if a user arrives from google and <value> is set to “google.com” the condition will be true.

• role – Matches the current user’s role. The match needs to be exact so “admin” will not match “administrator”. Use role with and empty value if you want to match users that are not logged in.

Examples

Display content based on query string:

[if qs=”utm_source:partner-site”]
This content is only displayed if the current URL contains a GET paramater ‘utm_source’ with value ‘partner-site’
[/if]

Display content based on referrer:

[if referrer="www.google.com"]
 This content is only displayed if the referring URL contains 'www.google.com'
[/if]

Display content based on user role:

[if role="editor"]
 This content is only displayed if the user is logged in with the role 'editor'
[/if]

Setting multiple conditions and combining condition types:

[if referrer="www.example.com" qs="utm_source:partner-site"]
 This content is displayed to users coming from example.com who clicked on a link originating from our RSS feed.
[/if]

Matching with `exact` or `contain`

By default query string conditions are matched on the exact value as defined in the shortcode. For looser ‘wildcard’ matching you can add a match attribute with the value contain:

[if qs="product-type:cashmere-" match="contain"]
 Good choice! Cashmere is a wonderful fabric.
[/if]

This will match both ?product-type=cashmere-sweater and ?product-type=cashmere-coat

Matching on multiple values

You can have a condition match on multiple values by using the semicolon as a seperator when defining allowed values. Example:

[if qs="product-type:shoes;coat"]
  This text is displayed for people who bought either a nice pair of shoes or a great fashionable coat.
[/if]

Nesting `if` statements

You can nest statements but you have to use iteration. This has to do with the limitations of the built-in shortcode API.

[if qs="tonight:the-night"]

  Tonight's the night.

  [if2 qs="future:beautiful"]

    We create our own destiny every day we live.

  [/if2]

  [if2 qs="future:platic"]

    I see sheets of plastic in your future.

  [/if2]

[/if]

You can nest up to if4 (4 levels).