Implementing Hooks

Another core concept of Contao are so called Hooks. They allow you to implement custom logic in certain points of the execution flow of Contao’s framework. To better understand what that means, two examples will be shown in this getting-started tutorial.

Assuming you have autoloaded and autoregistered your services as described here, implementing a hook is as easy as creating one single PHP file containing your hook’s logic. Hooks can be registered through service tagging and thus you can also use annotations directly in your hook’s class to register the hook.

For our first example we assume that we want to provide more information about the author of a news entry in the news template. Usually $this->author in the news template is filled with by <Author Name>. No other information about the author is available via the news template’s variables. Instead of fetching the information we need with custom PHP code in the template, we can instead implement a parseArticles hook. This hook allows us to enrich the template object of a news entry with additional variables, before the template is parsed for each news entry. The implementation of this hook also uses the concept of Contao’s Models: the database entry of the news entry’s author is fetched via the \Contao\UserModel.

// src/EventListener/ParseArticlesListener.php
namespace App\EventListener;

use Contao\CoreBundle\ServiceAnnotation\Hook;
use Contao\FrontendTemplate;
use Contao\Module;
use Contao\UserModel;

/**
 * @Hook("parseArticles")
 */
class ParseArticlesListener
{
    public function __invoke(FrontendTemplate $template, array $newsEntry, Module $module): void
    {
        // Fetch the news entry's author
        $author = UserModel::findByPk($newsEntry['author']);

        // Override the "author" variable of the template with the row information of the author
        $template->author = $author->row();
    }
}

Now, in any of our news templates, we can access any information about the news entry’s author directly.

 <!-- templates/news_short.html5 -->
 <div class="layout_short arc_<?= $this->archive->id ?> block<?= $this->class ?>" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
 
-  <?php if ($this->hasMetaFields): ?>
-    <p class="info"><time datetime="<?= $this->datetime ?>" itemprop="datePublished"><?= $this->date ?></time> <?= $this->author ?> <?= $this->commentCount ?></p>
-  <?php endif; ?>
+  <p class="author"><a href="mailto:<?= $this->author['email'] ?>"><?= $this->author['name'] ?></a></p>

   <h2 itemprop="name"><?= $this->linkHeadline ?></h2>
 
   <div class="ce_text block" itemprop="description">
     <?= $this->teaser ?>
   </div>
 
   <?php if ($this->hasText || $this->hasTeaser): ?>
     <p class="more"><?= $this->more ?></p>
   <?php endif; ?>
 
 </div>

The following more complex example shows how to customize the personal data update procedure of your members. Assume you have an external service, against which the personal data of members need to be kept in sync, whenever a member changes his personal data. The Personal data module of Contao provides a updatePersonalData hook which will be triggered when, as the name of the hook suggests, a member updates his personal data via this module.

// src/EventListener/UpdatePersonalDataListener.php
namespace App\EventListener;

use App\ExternalMembers\ExternalMemberService;
use Contao\CoreBundle\ServiceAnnotation\Hook;
use Contao\Module;
use Contao\FrontendUser;

class UpdatePersonalDataListener
{
    private $externalMemberService;

    public function __construct(ExternalMemberService $externalMemberService)
    {
        $this->externalMemberService = $externalMemberService;
    }

    /**
     * @Hook("updatePersonalData")
     */
    public function onUpdatePersonalData(FrontendUser $member, array $data, Module $module): void
    {
        $this->externalMemberService->updateMemberData($data);
    }
}

The hook requests an instance of a hypothetical ExternalMemberService. Whenever a member updates her or his personal data, the hook will be triggered and the updated data will be sent to that service, which then handles updating the member’s data in that external service.

These are just some basic examples of what could be done with hooks, providing a glimpse into the possibilities. To learn more about hooks, visit the dedicated article of the framework documentation and have a look at the complete reference of hooks.

Next: implementing content elements and front end modules.