How do You Want to Create Content from Front-Pages?

   Amir

Discussions

May 25, 2012
141

One of the most popular requests for Types is to enable creating content from public pages.

What we want to have is:

  1. Visitors see a form to submit stuff, like the ‘Add your site’ form in our Showcase (don’t forget to submit your site).
  2. That form includes the right fields for the content type. It will include the title, body, custom fields (with appropriate inputs and choices) and taxonomy. The input form should also include information about who’s submitting it and something against SPAM.
  3. Once submitted, you should get an alert and a new post is created. It can get published right away, or wait for moderation. I would also like to be able to give privileges to users, so that some can create published content and for some, moderation is required.

Front-end post creation

Our main concern is the ‘how’.

My thoughts are:

  • Integrate with Gravity Forms
  • Integrate with Formidable Forms
  • Integrate with other form-building plugins
  • Build it ourselves

What do you think? What would you like to use most?

More comment -> more votes -> better chance you’ll get what you want!

 

Comments 141 Responses

  1. Hi Amir,

    It’s a great idea.

    I think that the best solution would be to support most popular form plugins like the ones you have mentioned plus possibly CForms, Contact Form 7 and the recently introduced Jetpack contact form.

    How can we use this feature? If we are building a real estate management system we could allow company employees to publish estates from a front-end form and only the admin would have to be trained to use the full admin panel.

  2. Amir,

    That’s a great initiative. I myself believe that going with Gravity Forms can be a very good fit.
    BTW – I managed to do what I needed in terms of connectivity between different custom post types by using the plugin posts 2 posts.

    Tsahi

  3. Hi guys,

    I am SO happy that you are working on this feature.

    I would strongly suggest you to go for Formidable Forms instead of gravity forms!!!

    Even though I bought Views, at the moment, I can’t really use Types&Views since of the lack of support with Formidable Pro… Some fields mapping work but it’s not the case for multiple checkboxes…

    I really prefer Formidable over Gravity.

    I am really looking forward to see this feature coming out. Any ETA on this?

    Keep up with the good work!

    JS
    JS

    • ETA really depends on what we decide to build. Let’s see which direction we’re going to and then we’ll know how long it will take.

  4. This would be very useful plugin. But I think that there should definetly be an option to moderate what users submit.

    Also, from the developer standpoint I wouldn’t need integration with form plugins. But I can see that the regular user would need that option.

    Can’t you just make it like types? You put template tags in your theme, but this would be reverse than what types do as this functionality would render input, textarea etc. tags instead of field values.

    That would be my suggestion, but as I’m not a programmer I don’t know how or even if you could make that kind of functionallity.

    Anyway, great idea for a great plugin. You have my support 🙂

    • Stand-alone is one of the options we’re considering. This is the option with the most work for us, but it makes this completely independent of anything else you’re using.

      • Hey guys!

        I’d personally prefer if it was done without any dependancies, but optional connectors to various WP form builders, like Gravity Forms, Formiddable Forms, etc.

        The base included version could be more aimed at dev’s, where the interface is only really used to manage and create the various form fields and the layout and styling is handled by the dev. Then with a solid frontend form building api, we could build some really powerful forms.

        Then for users that prefer the drag and drop form builder, they can optionally purchase a connector addon for the form builder they are using.

        Something along the lines of do it yourself or pay a bit more to use a specialized form building tool.

        Another reason to keep the base functionality in T&V’s is the added cost of the form builder (ranging from $40 to $200 depending on what you need to do), so having that as the only option would essentially add to the total cost of choosing T&V’s over the competition.

        Just my 5 cents. Super stoked you guys are starting to tackle the frontend submissions! 😀

        PS, I’m using T&V’s on my first real project and I gotta say, I’m completely hooked! Really digging how you guys have really thought out everything.

        My only comment it would be nice if there was a (possibly hidden) option to enable more WP-esque icons 😛 The current ones stand out like a sore thumb, which I guess was the point, but I’m sure the same result could be achieved using a more blended approach.

        Cheers,
        Chris

  5. +1 on the integration using existing engines. Specially Formidable, because of the Free Version, and Gravity Forms.

      • Well, people do need to make some sort of living, right? Anyway, we’re exploring options now and we’re getting excellent feedback here – your too. Thanks.

        • No, Amir, you miss my point: I was responding to Jordi Llonch’s mention that he favored Formidable over Gravity “specifically … because of the Free Version”. I was just saying that the existence of the free version is irrelevant to this particular discussion.

          I am a paying member here and have a developer license at Gravity Forms, and if you decide to use Formidable Forms to make this fantastic feature possible, I will buy a dev license for that too.

          I have actually spent quite a large part of today looking into this issue and, on the whole, I agree with Jordi: I would MUCH prefer you to use an existing engine rather than waste valuable time writing your own standalone code.

          This is such an important feature, the sooner it appears that better! I would also worry that, if you decide to do it yourself, other priorities may emerge and it might never happen. Better to choose the easiest, quickest route and trust that, for those of us who will use it, paying a reasonable amount for another plugin will not be a problem.

          I am a big fan of Gravity but, for this particular use, it does appear that Formidable are ahead.

          Gravity users have long been interested in front-end editing but the developers have stated that, because of the large number of paying customers depending upon their product, they are no longer in a position to include new features quickly. It is in their plans but Carl has said not to expect anything until later in the year and, of course, he’s not promising anything.

          Formidable, meanwhile, already have the feature in place, I see that Steph, the developer, has already indicated her support for integration and, although I had not previously been very aware of it, I see some people whose technical nous I respect, such as Stephen Carroll of ServerPress.com, vouching for Formidable here.

          • Just a quick follow-up to mention that front-end editing of Gravity Forms-created posts IS possible via this third-party plugin by Kevin Miller of p51 Labs:

            http://www.p51labs.com/gravity-forms-update-post-plugin-v0-5-1-released/

            … but having to depend upon two rather than just one other plugin would be messy and, obviously, third-party plugins are not officially supported by the Gravity Forms team.

            Kevin of p51 Labs explains:

            “With this plugin you can setup a post form and then pass a post ID to it, allowing the front end updating or even deletion of content through Gravity Forms.

            This add-on is planned at Gravity Forms at some point but we just couldn’t wait as there is a big need now for this kind of functionality, so we took a first stab at it.”

            • That’s nice and maybe we can cooperate with Kevin, but I’m not going to make it our official solution and depend on two other plugins, over which we have zero influence. Eventually, if we decide this is critical functionality, we need to be responsible for it.

          • @Amir

            Yeah, that’s what I’m saying: despite the overwhelming support for Gravity Forms in these comments, the only way to use it to implement this feature would be to either use two plugins, which would be too messy, or wait for it to become an official Gravity Forms feature, which won’t be happening any time soon.

            So, because of that, the only logical option would be to use Formidable Forms, because they already have the full set of features that you need.

            Also, yes, I agree, in the longer-term it would make sense to create your own code for critical functionality, but using Formidable Forms would be a good first step, allowing you to ship the feature more rapidly and, then, discover how much actual demand there is for it.

            Very excited to see you moving in this direction, I think it will be hugely useful to a lot of people.

  6. I think it will be great to see all of forms solutions integrated with Types, Contact Form 7 and Gravity Forms first of all.

  9. Definitely Gravity Forms. This is one of the best plugins for WordPress you can get (alongside Types/Views naturally…). Integration with Gravity Forms would be very helpful.

  10. Hi there,
    very good idea!!
    We´ve checked a lot of different Plugins for forms. Finally we went for Gravity forms. Best performance overall, a lot of usefull extensions. So, if you start with gravity forms we think that will give types and views another push.

    Go for it!!

  11. I just spend the last 2 weeks working exclusively on frontend post creation for http://Wildtrader.ca (Beta site launches next week).

    During the process I researched a dozen ways of creating content from the frontend and i implemented and thoroughly tested 5 of them. In the end I chose to use a combination of Gravity forms and Front-end Editor. Post is created with gravity forms and then edited with front-end editor.

    Gravity forms is rock solid and the team of there is great.
    Front-end editor is pretty darn cool also. I’ve tweaked capabilities such that a user can edit their own post anywhere that post appears on the website and in any template. As cool as that is, the two plugins use different methods of saving content and I’m having trouble applying hooks to Front-end Editor.

    With that said, when a more integrated solution comes along, I will likely upgrade. I’m hoping that solution comes from gravity forms.

    Front end post editing is a very popular topic over at Gravity forums these days and they are currently working on an an Add-on for frontend post editing but are being vague with a release date. I would encourage you guys to pursue a relationship with them.

    What a powerful combo this would be.

  12. great !!!!!! this is, what i thougt right this morning, was missing for wordpress! i’ll be the first client when it comes out 🙂

  13. Amir.,,

    I use both gravity forms and Formidable Pro. In my humble opinion Formidable is far more robust and the folks there are far more engaged with and attentive to the development community.

    My vote is for formidable. After playing with both Gravity and formidable to create front end posting for our collection of sites, I have am using types & views with formidable and am familiar with what has to be accomplished, so integration would be a fairly straight forward matter.

    Stephanie Wells is remarkably available over there and ALWAYS responds to questions with smart solutions within a day at the latest. truly a pleasure.

    I believe Type and Views and Formidable Pro share at a degree of attentiveness towards your developers and evolving your products that make you both stand out and a great fit that would make this combined offering a positive experience for customers with stellar support.

    Formidable might not be as well known as Gravity, but I believe largely thats due to Gravity being the incumbent that people automatically default to suggesting (I have been guilty of that as well in the past), not based on a legitimate feature comparison.

    Gravity can be quite frustrating getting solutions to edge case uses of their software and evolution is very slow. I find formidable offers a far greater opportunity to extend into this area.

    For what we are discussing here, Formidable is the stronger candidate/feature set, with most evolved offering, support, and commitment to growth in this area.

    Regardless of what way you choose, there will be a learning curve for most, and the combination that offers the most painless path to real world developers, most attentive support, and most robust option is the logical choice.

    • That’s very helpful. We use Gravity Forms on our sites and are not so familiar with Formidable, so this insight just what we need. We’re getting a lot of feedback here and will have a lot to consider. I’ll write a follow-up post with what we figure from all that, what we’re going to do and when you can expect it.

  14. Great idea! I’ve created custom stuff for this kind of functionalities several times and I think there are two important things to keep in mind:

    – Integrate the role system, for instance certain roles can add content to certain categories
    – Make the users able to edit / delete their content from the front end of the site.

    I would be happy to advise you more on this, so feel free to contact me.

    • Integration with Roles management is a great idea. Then, we can specify which user kinds and specific users can create content and if it goes live or waits for moderation. Front-side editing, as well as submission is also pretty powerful. I wonder if Gravity Forms, or any other contact form plugin has anything close to that.

      • I’m dealing roles management with this RIGHT NOW, So of course I find it very important 🙂

        • You’re in for a very nice surprise regarding role management for Types. We’re just finishing this and will be releasing Types Access early next week as Beta. It will be available to all Views customers.

  16. I would be great if the user could select a term from a taxonomy in a dropdown. For instance:

    A user bought a product from a particular collection and wants so send in feedback.

    It would be very handy if the user could select a term from a product taxonomy so that we can receive that as a variable in the mail and on the website.

    I’ve allready used the combination with GravityForms for used to be able to sign a petition. After the submission it gets the draft status so we can deceide when to show it on the website.

    • Oh, interesting suggestion. Selecting from a taxonomy (or a descendant of a specific taxonomy term) would allow submitters to self-categorize items.

  17. I already create content into a custom post type with gravity forms, so mixing that with types would get my vote.

    I see however that a DIY option might be preferred for people that haven’t invested in GF

  18. I’m a big Gravity forms fan so that would work for me.
    I’d like to see some simplification of the parent child relationship creation (especially for many-many) when aimed at user creation – perhaps the automatic creation of record structures in 2nd languages – side by side input for various language versions?

  19. For my part, for sure I’d ask for Gravity Forms, as I use this with every single site I build.

    🙂

  20. +1, really glad you all are planning this. My website (http://bestmoversindubai.com) publishes customer reviews, and it currently has a Gravity Form which allows visitors to submit a review as a post and holds it for moderation. It was kind of a pain to set up and it’s still not as functional as I’d like it to be, partly since I have to go back and forth between two forums to get support. It would be great if I could go to one place for all my questions.

    BTW if you need an actual site to do beta-testing on, contact me and we can talk it over.

    • Thanks for volunteering to help. Be sure we’ll take you up on that offer 🙂

      What are you using today to create the posts from the forms? What issues are you having?

      • Currently using Gravity Forms. Biggest difficulty is being unable to integrate all of the standard GF fields (multi-choice for example) into custom post fields. Might just be my inexperience but I still feel it’d be easier to manage if it were all under one roof.

      • Oh btw I haven’t tried other forms plugins (Formidable, etc.), so I don’t know if they’d be any easier. They may well be. As for beta-testing, it’s a standing offer so feel free to get in touch if and when needed. 🙂

  21. I support that you integrate with Gravity Forms AND integrate with Formidable Forms. These two seem to have the best feature set on the WP form market.

    A self-made solution would be cheaper for us View owners :-), but I do no think that you can that quickly implement a robust feature set like the two above offer.

  22. I would say Gravity Forms if I had to choose. They are incredibly responsive support-wise and their beta releases are usually so rock solid that I’ved used them for months on production sites without issue.

    Much appreciated.

  23. Yes!!! I’ve been waiting for this!!

    Definitely have an integration with Gravity forms but also have something that will stand alone.

    If someone doesn’t have a license with a third party plugin I think it would be essential for them to be able to at least get it to work with the stand alone plugin.

    Then maybe views will be able to let the user style and layout the front end form however they want.

    I like the idea of actually being able to layout the fields with views both in the front end for the user…. but also in the back end. Sometimes being able to layout the forms and group certain items left to right, then stack, make the forms easier to fill out for the user. Just an idea.

    • Yup, that’s my thought as well. I also want to be able to create the forms with HTML, to my exact liking. Gravity Forms is great for contact forms, but I might need full control over the HTML to create and edit content.

      • Yes, it seems to me that Gravity Forms is having a hard time shaking the contact form direction and moving to other things like custom content type input.

        there’s already a plugin or two that will allow you to use Gravity Forms as a front end for creating custom content type posts, but the ability to edit what you’ve created is still new and beta.

        Also, Gravity Forms still does not have a wysiwyg field, no options at all for creating a location map, and their conditional logic is missing things like testing for a blank field. My point being, did you want to tie your horse to plug in that has glaring feature omissions that have been absent from the plugin for a very long time and could be added in the future……or not?

        I bought a dev license for Gravity Forms and likely will not be renewing it.

        I haven’t played with Formidable at all, but I’ll be buying a license for it today to mess around with. It looks like it might be the ticket

  24. Amir,

    This is indeed a great idea. I am wanting to build a form that users to be able to input deals into the website like here: http://www.hotukdeals.com/submit?type=deals

    I assume this is the kind of functionality you are talking about?

    For me working with an existing plugin would be fine and it would save you a huge amount of development time.

  25. types and views has provided us a great way to launch a new section of our site, so first of all thank you!!!! secondly, gravity forms is what I use right now and works with what I need it to do, basically birthday listings for a section on our website. I’m pretty thrilled it has worked so well with types and views w/ the custom fields. I havent’ seen a need to switch from gravity to something else yet, my needs have been pretty simple.

  26. I would say there’s ups and downs to any route to be honest.

    If you code it all yourself you have much more control over everything and as long as the forms side of it is well thought out and thorough then you would probably be ok.

    The flipside is will you prevent people who have already spent time putting in place other forms plugins from wanting to use the product?

    I hate to say it but your best chance is to offer both. Include your own forms and ensure they are tight and then still offer integration to Gravity etc.

    Will mean more work sure but will also cover the bases and therefore a wider client base.

    cheers & good luck with the coding 🙂

    • I tend to agree. Still we’re humans here, so we’ll need to see where we start from. There’s a pretty overwhelming majority towards GF so far.

  27. Since WPML already integrated well with Gravity Forms, I would suggest taking that direction with Types as well.

  28. Doesn’t Gravity forms already provide for creating post types from a form – I know you can direct form values to custom fields – and if matched to the Types-created custom fields, this function already exists? Am I missing something?

    What I would really like is some means of editing content from the front end – that would be extremely useful.

    • Kind of. There’s a 3rd party plugin that creates the custom post types, but it has its glitches and issues. It’s working, but I’m not entirely happy with it. I would be glad if the author of that plugin would be happy to cooperate with us and make it fully compatible.

      • You’re right. This looks like something pretty specific. But maybe the IDX plugin folks will like to cooperate with us on this. I can check.

      • The IDX project I just finished involves a $100 setup fee for the data access setup/agreement and a $30 or so monthly subscription plan… which makes sense for MLS services (there’s money there)… I don’t think any MLS (there’s about 40 in the US) will provide access for free (but I could be wrong).

  29. Very good idea for interactive websites need, I work mainly with Real estate brokers, they can’t let people announcing by themselves their property without requesting brokers services first. But, being able to use it for a testimonial page in their website and being able to place random testimonial anywhere on the website would be GREAT! Any forms services would be welcome in your product! So It’s a good idea!

  34. Main developer of Formidable here. We’ve had several users using our plugins together. Formidable creates custom post types and allows front-end editing according to permissions set. The only gap I’ve seen from the help requested, is the time formats are saved differently and the checkboxes don’t mesh. If we can get around these two obstacles, I don’t think anything else is needed. Am I missing something?

    Also, in referernce to some of the requests above, most HTML is customizable, and the random testimonial can be done as well.

    • Makes me very happy to hear that. I’m contacting you privately to see how we can tie things together.

    • Yay! Great to see you here. I’m one of the users who combined Types & Views with Formidable front-end posting, and you’re right, it seems very close to complete integration.

      From a user’s perspective, the only problem I’m seeing right now is that the custom fields created in one plugin do not reflect in the other’s interface and post entry admin. Otherwise, these two work great together. Thank you both for making my job so much easier :-).

    • I think that Gravity Forms likely has more people using it so they’re more likely to chime in with what they know and are currently using.

      I haven’t use Formidable (yet) but at first glance it looks like the better tool for the job.

    • Hi ! I am one of the users who contacted both of you (Steph and Amir) in the past to try to make things move forward between Types and Formidable. I am so happy to see you guys now working together on this ! I can’t wait to see this feature added ! I can confirm that so far only the integration of time formats and checkboxes are missing. Did you guys make any progress on that lately ?

      It’s really great for us customers to see so much responsiveness and cooperation between you guys !

      JS

  35. I think you probably need to make it standalone and or support at least 2 other solutions.

    I would love to see gravity forms integration. And I think a free plugin like contact form 7 would be nice.

    Have you looked into Ninja Forms? Looks interesting.

  36. @chris +1. Totally agree with that. IMHO, Types should come with a form/fields API, used in turn by third party connectors for Formidable, GF, whatever you like the most.

    Many thx for this great feature.

    Frédéric

  37. Hey Guys,

    Didn’t have a chance to read all of the above comments, so forgive me if this was mentioned…

    i like gravity forms as an option… it’s robust in features, supported in many places, has all the functionality you might need…etc.

    Also, it would be awesome to have some kind of voting application for front-end users.. ie. either a rating system (1-5 stars), or a Vote UP / Vote Down system a la Reddit.

    good luck,
    and keep up the great work!
    ez

    • Rating is an interesting idea. There are two meanings, both are interesting:

      Rating as a post field, such as a reviewer giving a product a four-star rating.
      Rating of a post by others, such as subscribed users being able to see submitted posts and rating them up and down (which might affect their public visibility on the site).

  38. +1 for Formidable. I’ve used their form builder which allows you submit contents as get parameters, which I then feed directly into Types & Views to make “User Customized” views. I just wish the URL wasn’t so long. I guess I could leave up to either of you to please consider POST parameter support.

    If you want to address the general needs of future users (and uses), look no further then old school “Access” and “Crystal Reports”. THAT ancient technology is stil in use, ports to the web poorly, and is giving way to developers itching for solutions using WordPress and your product.

  39. Definitely Types, Views, Gravity forms and especially Event Espresso to allowed users roles permissions to post their events.

  41. Thanks for moving in this direction!

    I’m about a week away from finishing the configuration of just such a round-trip data interface. Archives aren’t done yet but here is the front end form I’ve created with WP-Views and Gravity Forms

    http://mainelearning.net/resources/recommend/

    Now, as nice as Gravity Forms is, if you were able to provide a simpler interface for creating front-end forms, that would definitely be preferable for those who need not purchase GF.

    As a matter of fact, for the middle-level of user you target with WP-Views, the forms could actually be defined with bracketed tags rather than a full drag-and-drop GUI which actually takes longer when there are a lot of custom fields. Using WPV and GF is also not something to be done by the weak-of-heart, given the advanced taxonomy configurations. I consider GF to be most useful for novices who need a drag-and-drop.

    (One nice thing Gravity Forms has are conditionals. Note how, when you select content areas in the form, above, subfields appear below. Also, we implemented Chosen for multi-selects, which definitely saves space.)

    All submissions should be able to be placed in draft mode so they can be moderated, either with built-in workflow, or with a plugin like Edit Flow.

  42. I’ve been using Formidable Forms and find very easy to use. It’d be great to integrate Types with Formidable Forms!

    Thank you!

  45. My vote is definitely for Gravity Forms!! It would be amazing if Types / Views could integrate with GF – the best forms plugin available, and I’ve used them all!

  46. Even though it’s the most work for you, making it part of your system (stand-alone) is far better than just connecting to someone else.

    Cons to relying on other plugins: When you connect to someone else, you have to choose which one (or support many). You can never make all your customers happy because each one will prefer different forms plugin. And when the other plugin makes a change it forces you to test and see if their change affected your plugin.

    If you decide to connect with another plugin, I recommend you find one that 1) is widely known 2) is reliable and robust (more likely to work for more of your customers) 3) is free or very affordable and 4) has good support and active programmers. As soon as you rely on someone else specific in order for your “feature” to work, then YOUR reputation is on the line with your customers and the other plugin will affect your customers’ satisfaction with you. So you’re putting a lot of trust and risking something when you connect with one or two plugins in order to make your feature work.

    This functionality could be designed as a module for your plugin and I would be happy to pay more for it if I needed it. Not everyone will need this feature, so I say build it yourself as stand-alone and then charge for it and keep all the profits. 🙂

  47. I would add to the crowd that Gravity Forms and Formidable would both be great integration points. I use both with Types & Views.

    I know some will say that you should build it yourself, and I can see the merit in that, because you could control everything you’re doing, but the issue is that you then take your eyes of custom post types and visually depicting them. Instead you start having to focus on forms. It will change your core and what you have to care about.

    So I say leave the form building to two other great products and simply integrate.

  49. I would go with gravity forms as they have be around for a while and have been thoroughly tested and debugged. Or create that functionality yourself. You guys seem to make great plugins so either would good with me.

  52. I would hope that whatever solution you use allows custom media fields. I could use this for my songwriting site which is stuck on drupal at that moment since WP has a hard time with my use case (users submit songs).

    A clean way to add a song and lyrics etc would be awesome. I don’t mind if they have to be registered, in fact I require it.

  53. I’m a great fan of formidable, its easy to use and is actively developed and supported. I use it on several websites for customer data-entry and use it with views to good effect

  54. Vote for either stand-alone solution or Formidable Forms.

    As opposed to Gravity Forms, the functionality you need, front-end posting with the ability to post to draft or publish, comes out of the box in Formidable. In fact, after trying out many free and paid front-end posting solutions during my 6+ years of WordPress design, this is by far the most thorough and easy solution I’ve found.

    In addition, the developers are very responsive, they already use and love Types (there’s a good article about Types on their web site) and would likely be happy to provide support for any integration, and the plugin itself is incredibly easy to use and very flexible.

  55. Some people prefer Gravity, some people prefer Formidable. Just build your own and have the best features of both Forms

    New customer may not want to buy your products if they found out that have to paid extras for other addons from other companies to get full feature.

    You can always charge more for the great products and support you provided.
    I have just purchased Views last month, it is an Excellent product.
    Thank you very much for the excellent products you made, Types and Views

    One more thing
    It would be better for the “image custom field??, if you can add a feature the let the user re-size image before upload. User have the option to set the width or the height of image filed. If only one of the filed is set, for example, only the width is set, the height should be automatically set to “height : auto;?? to maintain aspect ratio of the image.

    Again, thank you very much.

  56. Amir,

    ya integration is good, I’d prefer Gravity since my team and I use it all the time 🙂

    Thanks

  57. I’d like to see support for WebHooks like I would use with Wufoo and in fact just recently wrote a little plugin for this (create-user-remote, find on github). The project required creating new users upon form submission, with lots of extra data WordPress doesn’t normally support. Rather than add new custom fields to users, I utilized custom post types, taxonomies, and fields as provided by types to store the additional information and used the author field to link to the associated WP user. When a user is logged in, they can see a wholesale order form, itself created by a short PHP script to add one quantity input field for every Product published, and on submit the form send an email with all of the associated user information.

    Maybe this is obvious already but it would really be more important to me for Types to have an included API that makes it easier to manage posts and their taxonomies plus custom fields. Hopefully I’m not missing something already existing here… After this, I would want the API extended so I could modify post types, taxonomies, and custom fields too.

    In my opinion a front-end form input solution belongs in a separate plugin, since it should also support adding new posts, pages, and maybe even users, media, and more. Since you’re doing great work toward making it very easy and stable to have many post types and other wise developers should work toward extending Types rather than add CPTs into their own plugin/theme.

    I have another plugin which adds one custom post type called Glossary Terms. Many people have asked for this plugin to be updated with functionality for making more than one custom post type. I’m currently leaning toward adding functionality which can display posts from types added with Types etc. using my jQuery animated folding view.

    It would be cool if you put up an extensions section of the website here, to showcase other plugins or scripts used to connect with the functionality of Types. If you actually create an API or even go so far as to add plugin functionality to Types itself this would be great as another section for the site too.

    One last thing; if Types is open source maybe you could create a github project for it.

    🙂

  58. Hi Amir,

    I definitely suggest you to build this solution yourselves! My opinion is that, on a WordPress site, the more plugins you have installed, the more chances you have of running into compatibility issues, hacking vulnerabilities and the more difficult it is to manage that site.

    Thanks for what you’ve done so far and looking forward to new features/releases of the plugin!

  59. Although I’m using Gravity Forms to allow users to submit content on the front-end – and it works fine – my vote would be for you guys building your own.

    That would open your product up to more people and, of course, allow you total independence from any other product.

  60. Just bought Views after using Types on a couple of sites and being very impressed! Really glad to hear right off the bat that you’re working on this new feature. Just my two cents, I’ve used GF on a few sites to allow front end content creation, basically it just comes down to finding the right hooks to grab the content after submission and then using WP functions to create or edit a custom post after messing with the form data — it’s a pain, but not an overwhelming task for developers. That said, if you can bring a product to market for roughly the same cost as Views, I’d but a developer’s license in a heartbeat. It seems to me that long term, you’ll get more traction by making it a stand-alone product with simple form building built in and connectors for popular form plugins. If you can support GF, Formidable (which I’m thinking of jumping ship for from GF), and Contact Form 7, that would give a really good range of free and paid options. Anyway, just my vote to add to the fray, but for what it’s worth I would definitely buy this on top of what I’ve paid for Views, I think that it can stand as a new plugin, not just a feature addition to Types and Views.

  62. We have built the integration for Gravity Forms that we need atm. But it looks like we are going to make a push to move all our client sites to Formidable and need to redo the integration part so this comes right in time.

    The reason for our move is not about tech nor economics (altough the price for Formidable is not in the same neighborhood). Our company has just become allergic to recurring payments for modules and themes. We have no problem paying for updates and support and are ready to pay more for unlimited licenses, but the administration for all recurring payments has just got out of hand.

    • I never thought about recurring payments as a source of hassle, but you have a good and valid point. If we offered ‘lifetime’ renewals for Views for a reasonable amount, would that make you happy?

      • We already have it since we entered in beta. But if we would buy it now we would think twice and prefer paying more for a lifetime licence. There are two reasons for this:

        1. Things change
        What i consider to be main development platform has changed over the years. Html > asp > php > xoops > mambo > drupal > joomla > wordpress

        Changing platform is always somewhat painful but needs to be done often due to market demands. To make a long story short we still have recuring costs for sytems we no longer use to any large extent in new development.

        From the plugin developers point of view: what is to say that our company is in bussiness in a year? A bird in the hand..

        2. Administration
        We have bought about 100 themes and modules over the years. If everything would be one site one year i wouldnt have any time free doing actual work.

        Yes, to us recuring payments is a turnoff and if for instance wpml would go for lifetime licence we would probably buy it.

        (was writing this on my mobile so probably more typos then usual)

        Best,
        Rickard

  63. No dependancies feels like a best solution maybe with plugin support that adds integration between different form plugins.

    I’d love to use this without additional costs + it gives more control over plugin functionality.

  65. If I build a complex site i try to use as little plugins as possible and to use those that provide most complete functionality. I’m doing so beacuse the weakest point of the whole development process is the interaction between plugins – I have to look carefully on how they work together. If I use 40 small plugins for certain functionality there are 40 possible problems, if I use 4 complex and complete plugins, I have 4 possible problems, but if I use 1 plugin I usually have no problems at all.

    Now, combing all my thoughts together I vote for your own standalnone solution – as most of the functionality is already there in Types, and this is not large step to provide it to the frontend. But you should also think of addons for Gravity and Formidable, as this might be a shorthand for people already using it. But if you decide to focus on integration, I used both, Gravity and Formidable Pro for a couple of project and I find FPro far better and more complete solution than Gravity. Not mentioning outstanding support form Stephanie.

    • We got a ton of feedback here, went through it and combined it with our experience too. It’s not just a matter of number of plugins, but also the end-results that we want to get.

      It looks like integration with 3rd party plugins will be faster, but we’ll have to make a lot of compromises. Also, we’ll always depend on their pace. So, we’ll be building our own complete solution for front-page editing. This will not really compete with classic ‘contact forms’, as contact forms have different requirements. Our solution will be optimized for creating and editing content in ‘posts’.

      We already have detailed planning for this and we’re starting to code pretty soon. I’ll write about this when we have something to show.

      • Thats a very good decision I think.

        Both FPro and Gravity use it’s own tables and those entries are it’s native data storage. Submiting posts is possible in both but it is something like extra functionality. Front-end editing of entries and posts is posible in FPro, but only if you use both content types simultaneously (entry and post). It’s not accesible in Gravity at all – not mentioning there’s not even support for custom post types in it’s core (you have to use community plugin) – people from Gravity – wake up! – it’s 2012! In other words focusing on creating and editing WordPress native content types – posts and custom post types is a VERY good idea.

        My wishlist : 🙂
        – editing users profile from frontend
        – listing user posts with option to delete/edit/change status
        – listing user comments
        – controling access to functionalities and fields based on user roles and/or capabilities
        – login / registration / password recovery controlled by types also – to give users complete wp functionality from registration to post submission
        – options to handle redirects and blocking access to backand depending on user role

  66. Hi, new here but have been looking furiously for this type of functionality where visitors can submit a ‘report’ regarding a specific page containing info on a lake or river (basically a fishing site that allows visitor submitted reports on the fishing conditions of specific lakes around the country). The Types & Views plugin caught my eye as it states we can create and view any type of content. But, does it not have the ability to what this thread describes? Create a form submitted by the visitor and display the results?

    Amazing, but I can’t find this anywhere in the WordPress community.

    • Not yet, but coming soon. This is what we’re discussing here. I’ll write a lot more about it when there’s something to test.

      • Amir, thanks for the response. Unfortunately I have an immediate need for this type of functionality so it looks like i’ll have to do it as a totally custom coding setup. Is there some sort of major hurdle in the WordPress framework that prevents developers from doing this? It seems so straight forward and could even be as simple as expanding the comments functionality to simply allow more fields. But I may be looking at this too simplistically. It’s hard for me to believe that this sort of functionality wasn’t requested years ago and that there’s no a dozen plugins that already do it! I’ll watch your progress here but on a realistic note, if your crew cranked up on this right away, what is the timeframe to accomplish it as a new add-on to your Types & Views plugin?

      • Hi Amir,

        I am glad to hear that you guys have started to code it already. Would you be able to provide a very rough estimate of the timeframe we are talking about here to implement that? I need to publish a first version of my website and I can’t do it without a solution.

        If you need too much time, how about a transitional solution where you could integrate with Formidable Pro (the only gap missing are the integration for time formats and checkboxes, all the rest already works out of the box) quite quickly while you keep on working on your own in-house solution to be released later on as you have decided already?

        Thank you very much in advance for your help !

        JS

        • Our initial planning says around 3 months from now. I know that this is a lot, but it’s also a pretty large project. We’re also going to work on shorter term solutions with GF and FormidablePro. This is not entirely in our hands and will greatly depend on their schedule as well.

          You need to remember that these temporary solutions are not always much faster. True, it’s faster to get ‘something’ ready, but if the design is not intended for that, often a lot of time is spent trying to get everything fully working.

  68. I have a Formidable Pro developer license. The funtionality to create Content from Front-Page is already integrated into Formidable Pro and has advanced funtionality.

  69. Headway + Types & Views (headway-views!!!) + WPML + Formidable Pro = A match made in heaven

  70. I’d certainly vote for integration with Gravity Forms in addition to a stand-alone solution. It took some time to learn the CSS classes necessary to effectively style a form in Gravity, and I know I’d appreciate the option of recycling that work. You may want to contact Carl as he’s been open and active in development of integrations with folks like Chris Jean over at iThemes, Scott with PODS, and at least one of the major e-commerce developers (whose name escapes me.) Good luck!

    At any rate, front-end filtering with some basic logic is really the missing link that occassionally drives us to Drupal. To the extent that Types and Views provide this, there would rarely be a reason to move away from our familiar territory and WordPress.

    • Thanks for the suggestion Brandon. We’re doing exactly that. What do you mean about front-end filtering?

  71. I would give MLN if when editing a custom post type you have a dropzone for images. Above or below (or beside…whatever) that dropzone thumbnails for the images attached to that specific post are displayed and draggable to determine order. When the post is deleted, the images associated with that post are deleted too.
    That sir, would be epic.

  72. I’m using Formidable. Rather, I’m testing it. I much prefer it over Gravity. I own licenses to both. It’s more developer-friendly and the support is awesome. The most important reason I am using Formidable is that it lets a user both enter and update (just his own) an entry on the front end. Unless they have added it since i looked at it, Gravity does not let a user edit an entry from the front end. This is huge.

    My only problem is that I wish the querying, selection and display of data was cleaner. So I came back here to Views to see if maybe I can use Views to show what’s been created in Formidable. But with Formidable displays, the edit link to the entry is right there if I want, and don’t know if I can integrate this with Views.

    So YES on integrations, and YES on formidable.

    • Thanks for explaining this. It helps a lot to know which features you find valuable. Our schedule for front-end editing for Views is accelerating. I think that we’ll have something nice to show in about a month from now.

      • Hey Amir!
        Any news on which direction you guys are taking for the frontend submission? I’ve been comparing a couple of the form builders for some upcoming projects and knowing which one you guys have chosen would definitely help me decide 😉
        Cheers,
        Chris

        • We’re looking for a beta release in about 2 weeks. Contact forms are great, but since we’re building this specifically for front-end creation and editing, it’s at a completely different level than what you’d expect from a contact form plugin. It might be worth the wait 🙂

          • Thanks for the update Amir 🙂

            Nice to hear the beta is that close!

            My previous mention regarding the form builders was in response to the previous discussion in this comment thread about which form builders you guys might support, ie gravity forms, formidable, etc.

            Just to make sure I have it right, are you saying you guys are adding frontend submissions, natively into T&V’s? If that’s the case, will you still be adding support for any of the form builders that have been suggested in the comments or will it be native only?

            Thanks and keep up the great work!

            Cheers,
            Chris

            • We considered different alternatives and carefully studied the pros and cons. Eventually, we decided to take the long route and build our own plugin. This proves to be right. The level of integration we achieved with both Types, Views and WPML makes it worthwhile.

              Support for other plugins greatly depends on the level of interest and cooperation that we get from the other authors. Of course, if they’re interested and willing to work on this with us, we’re more than happy.

              One of the reasons we chose to role out our own, is to be able to progress without delays and without compromise. We’ll do all the compromising needed when we work with others. However, we really want to see one solution that works exactly as needed.

          • Yup, rolling your own definitely gives you full control over the plugin, so I can see how that route makes sense. I’ll hold off asking about specifics, as I’m sure you guys have an update post in the works, but I’m VERY curious to find out more about how you guys seeing it all come together 😉 Based on everything you’ve done with T&V’s so far, I’m sure it’ll be awesome 😛

  73. Yes, I will put my project on hold as well to see what you guys develop. I’m holding my breadth, so please don’t take too long.

      • OMG I’m so excited! I’ve been looking for a good solution for front end editing for a solid month. My list of possible solutions is a mile long – and none of them made me happy. I came by your site before today, but I didn’t see anything about you guys working on this, so I forgot about it. I came on this post from a Google search. You might want to just put something on your homepage that says you are working on this…since it is so close especially.

        There is such a need for this. It really is a gap in the marketplace.

        Really, really glad you went with writing your own. Having control over the code and making it tightly integrated is so worth it. I’d much rather buy one suite of plugins that I know work together than have to try to integrate a bunch of different plugins myself and hope they continue to work together. Woot!

        I’m curious, now that you are adding this new major functionality, have you thought about renaming the whole shebang as something more brandable (i.e. unique) than “Types and Views”?

        • We’re actually in the market for a good name. You’re right, this is no more just Types and Views.

  74. Any release date ?
    I am waiting for this feature like many others since May and now it’s getting harder to fait 🙂
    Thank you so much for your job, Types, and Views, bring WP right to the sky.

    • Actually yes. We’re almost done with the first round of development and starting a full round of QA. After this QA, we’ll have a first public release. It will be available to all Views customers.

  75. Could I get a link to download the BETA? I need this asap!! Gravity forms, is not encoding the data properly with certain elements of the site, so it’s causing problems.

    Can I see this?

    • Better let us get everything cleaned first. I understand that you’re on a tight schedule, but it’s not going to help if you start using something and then due to last-minute changes, you’ll need to rebuild it. I’ll publish a beta version even before we’re done with QA, but only after we’ve completed the last changes that we’re doing now. We’re almost there. Believe me, I’m itching to get it out even more than you want to try it.

  76. Any word on this!!!! We started using wp-types and views seeing that was going to be released and could really use this plugin!!! Anyway we can help?

    • Yes. We have an update. Next week, you’ll get a very nice beta release. I’m not sure on the exact day, but it’s coming out next week.

      • Hey, I know you say next week and you really don’t have a day. And i’m sorry, I thought I was going to be able to use Gravity Forms better for this. But I can’t and now I can get make this site live, and having some issues.

        Is there any more light you can shed on this for release, how it’s going to work, etc etc…

        • Sure. We’ve spent all this week on QA, English language review and usability. We’re 90% done with QA and have corrected a good number of problems during this pass. I’m still not sure about which day it’s going to come out next week, but next week it is. It’s not going to be anything like Friday 23:59, but more towards the beginning of the week.

          I’ll be writing basic documentation over the weekend and we’re doing every effort to have a nice beta ready for you. If we release it before there’s any documentation and plenty of bugs, we’re just going to waste everyone’s time.

          Integration with Gravity Forms is not quite in our hands. I talked with GF team several times. They appear to be busy with other things and are not working on this with us at the moment. This is one of the reasons we decided to build our own. Right after we got so many responses about Views clients wanting to see GF support, I contacted them. They are nice developers, but we cannot control their priorities.

          Hang on just a few more days. We’re almost there and I truly hope that you’ll be happy with this initial release. We’re putting every bit of effort into it.