Looking to allow users to contribute guest posts and other content from the WordPress frontend? Do you want your WordPress website to feature user-generated content and user-submitted posts? Wondering how to handle the client (user) submissions, especially when you have created a Custom Post Type (CPT) with custom taxonomies and meta fields?
In this article, we will show how you can allow users to submit posts (posts, pages, custom post types, & WooCommerce products) to your WordPress site. You can easily accept guest post submissions, user-submitted events, and many others without granting access to your WordPress dashboard.
Why Allow Users to Submit Posts on the WordPress Frontend?
Receiving content from site visitors is a great way to get new content for your site and growing your business.
For example,
- You have a food recipe blog and you want to collect recipes and recipe suggestions from your site visitors.
- You have a talent/modeling agency and you want to collect applications from aspirants and create profiles and portfolios.
In WordPress, in order to write a post, you would have to login into the admin area. If you want to receive content from site visitors without logging in you would need to have a frontend post submission form on your WordPress site.
Let’s see how you can create a WordPress post submission form and receive user-submitted posts on your site.
How to create a WordPress frontend post submission form?
There are several ways to do this, but the easiest and quickest way to do this is by using a WordPress frontend post submission plugin. In this article, we will use Tablesome, which is not only a WordPress frontend post submission plugin but a WordPress automation plugin.
Tablesome provides an easy way for visitors to submit content to your site. You can create a page, post, or use any available custom post type when a form is submitted.
You can choose to save it to draft so that you can review and approve it or publish the post immediately.
How to step up post-creation workflow:
- Setup your post submission form using any of the supported forms
- Use the Tablesome ‘Add Post’ action to setup the post-creation workflow
- Map the form fields to the corresponding post fields for easy frontend posting
- When a user submits a form, a post is automatically created, and the status is set to Pending or Published
Let’s see each step in detail.
Step-1: Creating a frontend post submission form
- In order to create a post submission, you can use any of the popular WordPress form plugins supported by Tablesome, that is Contact Form 7, WPForms, Forminator, and Elementor Form.
- You can make use of the basic Text and TextArea formats in the forms.
- Post Title, Post Content, and Post Excerpt are some of the basic fields available and you can have other post fields also including custom fields.
- After you have created the form you can add it to the respective WordPress page using a shortcode or a block provided by the form plugin.
Step-2: Setting up the post-creation workflow
Next, you have to setup the post-creation workflow using Tablesome. You can choose the form that you want to automate and the action that should be performed when a new form is submitted.
- To create a new post when a user submits a form you have the “Add Post(WordPress)” action
- Then use the drop-down to select the Post Type and you can choose the Post type including Posts, Pages, or any CPTs
Step-3: Map form fields to post fields
Next, you can map the form fields to the available post fields that you’ve created.
- Post Title and Post Status are the minimum necessary fields that have to be mapped.
- You can set the Post Status to be Draft, Pending Private, Publish, or Trash
- As of now, form submitter’s cannot select the Taxonomies on the frontend form, but the admin can select the taxonomies such as Categories, Tags, etc., and the selected Taxonomies will be assigned to the created post
- When have some custom fields you can map them using the Post Meta fields
Now you can save the form and test if the posts are being created on the All Posts page.
Besides creating posts with Tablesome you can perform multiple actions after form submission that is you can add users, save form entries, automatically export entries, and more.
Featured Image Attribution: Freepik – Flaticon
Review and Approve Posts
If you have chosen the Draft or Pending, you can see posts added on the All Posts page and you can review the posts before it’s made public and publish them accordingly.
