title: PHP syntax help to concatenate function in a string
body: <p>I'm working in wordpress using a theme that has a custom function to build a calendar page. This allows me to create a page with introductory text followed by events listings underneath.</p>
  
  <p>The listings allow the user to view the 'Prev' or 'Next' months events, but doing so causes the introductory text to disappear although the URL doesn't change.</p>
  
  <p>I've found the function in the theme files and tried editing it as below:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  if($action_identifier == 'get_cal'){
      $monthdata = explode('/', $thedata);
      $month = $monthdata[0];
      $year = $monthdata[1];
      $content = '&lt;div id="post" class="page"&gt;';
      $content .='&lt;div class="introduction"&gt;';   /* these */
      $content .= the_content();                 /* lines */
      $content .='&lt;/div&gt;';                       /* added */
      $content .= '&lt;div class="calmonth clear darkbox"&gt;';
      $content .= prevlink($month , $year);
      $content .= '&lt;/div&gt;';
      $content .= '&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class="calentries"&gt;';
      $content .= get_the_calendar($month,$year) . '&lt;/div&gt;';  
      $output = $content; 
  
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What I'm attempting here is to create the 'introduction' div and then use the wordpress function 'get_content' to display the page content in the div.</p>
  
  <p>This semi works in that it places the 'introduction' div where I want it, but doesn't display the content (it will display text when I type something in instead of 'the_content()' ). I think this is likely a syntax issue, because I'm an utter novice - can anyone give me any suggestions?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance.</p>