Meet CRED – Our Front-End Content Editing Plugin
We’re very happy to announce CRED (Create Edit Delete) – a fully integrated plugin for creating, editing and deleting content from front pages.
Let’s suppose you want to create a classifieds site and need to let visitors create ads. Â Or, you’re building a real estate site and need to give agents a way to add houses (or edit listings). Or even something simpler – allowing visitors to add entries to your showcase (like we have here).
Many modern websites are interactive, allowing visitors to create and edit content. This is what CRED is all about.
CRED Works on WordPress Content
The most important core ‘feature’ of CRED is that it works on WordPress content. CRED can create new content, edit and delete it.
CRED creates forms, which do this, but it’s not a ‘contact form’ plugin. CRED Forms are a way to access content and not the other way around.
When you create a form in CRED, you choose if it’s a new-content or edit-content form. Then you select what content type it operates on and build the form.
CRED lets you add fields for the basic post elements (title and body), for custom fields and for taxonomy. It supports repeating fields and different taxonomy types.
CRED pulls custom-field information from Types setup, so it already knows how to display the correct inputs for different field types.
CRED Puts You in Charge of Form Structure
CRED forms are built using HTML and shortcodes. There’s no fancy GUI, where you drag form elements around. Instead, there’s an efficient scaffold feature which auto-constructs an entire form for every post type. That form will include all the custom fields, and taxonomy with their correct input types and default values.
You’ll get the form’s HTML, complete with a minimum structure and CRED input shortcodes. That’s really all you need. You can either style that HTML with just CSS, or completely redo it, using whatever HTML structure you like.
And, if you prefer to build forms from scratch, without even a scaffold, you’re welcome to this as well. You’ll be able to insert post-fields (custom fields and taxonomy that belong to the post-type) and generic fields to your form.
The last step is to create your new page that you want to have your form displayed, including one of your custom post types, and simply insert the CRED form shortcode. This can be inserted anywhere on the page, co-existing with other content. With Views you’d be able to display a list of custom types and then add a CRED form at the bottom for people to add more items.
In any case, CRED will process the form and either create new content or update it in the database.
CRED is a Platform, for You to Build On
“Platform” is a big word, often used carelessly. We’ll try to live up to the promise.
We’ve built CRED as a tool that you can extend and build on. Out of the box, CRED can create and edit content. But it also comes with a set of carefully constructed hooks and filters, which let you build complete web applications with WordPress.
Let’s look at a simple example (which will soon be available to download as a reference site). Let’s say that we want to build a classifieds site. ‘Normal’ ads are free to post, but ‘featured’ ads cost money. When visitors create featured ads, you want to send them to a payment screen. You also want to create user accounts for everyone who posts an ad, so that they can later edit their own ads.
CRED makes this possible, by providing you hooks that run on specific forms. After you create the form, it gets an ID. You can setup a hook that will run when a new ad is saved (only after CRED validates the fields). Then, write your own code for what to do with the ad. You can create the WordPress user and then send them to PayPal.
Other examples for using CRED hooks is to redirect visitors to different locations after submitting forms, to validate form input using your own rules or to process data in different stages.
These hooks are not an afterthought. We’ve building CRED with real applications in mind, and we’re developing these reference apps as we go. CRED was born as a development platform.
CRED Validates Inputs
Remember that Types lets you set certain fields as required and validates field formats? CRED does the same.
Everything that you specify in Types, in custom field groups, is known to CRED. You don’t need to duplicate these groups at all. Just create the form in CRED and all the rules that you defined in Types apply to CRED as well.
CRED is Fully Integrated with Types and Views and Also Runs by Itself
We consider Types, Views, CRED and WPML as one big happy family. As such, they all work together, know each other and avoid the need to define anything more than once.
CRED gets every configuration it needs from Types. You can easily include CRED forms in Views and Content Templates. And, everything that you build with CRED is immediately available for translation by WPML.
However, CRED is also a great stand-alone plugin. You can use it with other plugins that define custom content, and it includes a complete PHP API for displaying forms.
We encourage you to use all our plugins together, but the choice is up to you.
Download and Documentation
Basic CRED documentation is available in our manuals section. We’ll be adding more there very soon and creating full-length tutorials and reference sites for you to follow.
You can download CRED from the Downloads page in your wp-types account. It’s open to all Views clients.
We plan to run several more Beta releases. When CRED hits version 1.0, it will also receive its own price tag and will be available for purchase. New customers will be able to buy CRED separately, or with Views at a reduced rate. Existing clients will receive CRED at no additional cost.
CRED Roadmap
This release includes the minimum functionality that we felt had to go into the first beta release. We’re still building things, which will go into coming beta releases.
Right now, CRED doesn’t yet have an access control mechanism. There’s also no export and import functionality. By the time we get to CRED 1.0, we’ll have all that and much more.
What do you think? Leave your comments and let us know!
Sounds very interesting and a clever name.
Does this also work with custom meta boxes and such?
Yup. CRED forms fully support custom fields (meta boxes) with all the different field types that you can setup in Types. Basically, if you can set it up in Types, you can create the content in CRED.
Wonderful. Would this plugin be able to allow users to suggest tags, upload missing featured images allow for content suggestions?
Yes. Visitors can type-in tags and categories. The taxonomy input (tags and categories) looks very similar to the WordPress admin. If it’s flat taxonomy (tags), you have a text input to create a new tag and a ‘most recent’ to select an existing tag. If it’s hierarchical taxonomy (categories), you can create a new category or choose existing ones using a checkbox.
CRED 0.9 doesn’t support featured images. We’ll add it to next week’s release.
You should give it a try (even without features images) and see if it does everything else that you expect. Feedback is highly appreciated.
That’s wonderful. Can’t wait to take it for a spin 🙂
Will give it a shot, thanks!
Excellent! Great timing for one of my projects.
Will CRED fully integrate with WordPress roles and capabilities? This looks awesome for a project I’m working on right now. However, we have to limit editing capabilities to the user who created the content.
I will download a start testing immediately.
Yes, and more. Remember our Types Access plugin? It looks frozen but is actually live and kicking. We’re fully integrating CRED with Types Access, improving its usability and making it a fun package to use.
CRED will automatically add forms and actions to Types Access admin screen. There, you can choose user-types to enable these actions for, or pick specific WordPress users.
Complete integration with Types Access should be here in about 1-2 weeks. It’s the next item we’re working on.
That’s awesome news. Is there any ability within these plugins to limit the amount of content a user can add? For instance, using your Classifieds example, what if their package allows for only 10 ads to be placed. Can the plugin (whether it be CRED, Access, or some combination) limit the number of entries a user can have?
Another example is using Types to have a user have an extended profile. Can the plugin be used to ensure that they can only have one profile?
I’m excited … I’ve been hoping this would come along as I don’t really want to give users access to the WordPress admin and I was hoping to be able to control the way the edit/add form would look.
Yes. For that sort of thing, we’ve included a complete hooks system (I still need to upload its documentation, hope to get it done today).
You’ll be able to use these hooks to intervene and add your application logic in any step. This includes enabling / disabling form actions, modifying content before displaying a form, when it’s submitted or saved to the DB, etc.
Our aim with this early release is to get a lot of feedback about what YOU need to build with CRED. We’ll use that information to make sure that the functionality and documentation are complete.
Have been waiting for this, thanks 🙂
A few questions regarding access: Will CRED and Types Access work with Groups http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/groups/ wich is used fpr access in woocommerce.
The functionality to have a user belong to more then one usergroup is something I think is missing in wordpress core. Will you make use of the Groups plugin or implement similar functionality in Types access?
I’m not sure about the Groups plugin. Haven’t seen it in action. I suggest to wait a bit until Types Access is updated and CRED is integrated. Then, you can try it and see if this meets your needs. Will be a lot easier to discuss this when we have it working.
Types Access lets you open actions to user types or specific users. The idea to add user groups too sounds great. We’ll see how this works and how it compares with other things on our development plan.
I’ve already created user forms in Gravity Forms that would create posts / posts types (that had been created using Types/Views), this provides the same functionality, but with full knowledge of the underlying Types/Views, is that correct?
On the surface, it looks like similar functionality, but if you dig deeper, you’ll start noticing the differences. We’re using Gravity Forms on our own sites and we have no intention of replacing it with CRED. GF is an excellent contact forms plugin.
CRED is a plugin for creating and editing content. It supports everything that you can define in Types, without any exception. It also lets you edit existing content and will very soon be connected with Types Access, for a complete access control system.
For very basic uses, you can get away with a contact form plugin, but when you go to build complete web apps, you’ll see that CRED is a lot more suitable. It’s built for that purpose, and not as an add-on or hack.
If you need just contact forms, there are simpler solutions than CRED. To build web apps, CRED will prove a lot more complete and straight-forward to use.
Very excited to get this set up and testing. Looks promising!
Looking forward to testing this out I already have a project that I may trial creed on.
Cheers
Awesome module. Can’t wait to try it.
Just a head’s up that on my 3.4.2 install when I install the plugin I am immediately invited to update to version 1.0 which turns out to be another plugin related to the yourcred micropayment system.
When I try to activate your plugin I get:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in /MY_SERVER_PATH/wp-content/plugins/cred/cred-loader.php on line 171
Just a teething problem I’m sure 🙂
Thanks for letting me know. I’ll change the plugin slug to something more unique.
Ha, this happend to me too – for a minute, when I saw that 1.0 was already available, I thought “Wow, these guys are working fast!” 😀
Thank you.. I didn’t know quite what happened!!
Sounds great! Will give it a try soon!
This is another out-of-the-park hit. Great job guys!
What about Headway integration ?
CRED should work just fine from within Headway. At the moment, we’re not planning to include a fancy GUI for Headway Grid editor, and I don’t think that it’s needed. CRED comes with its own form editing screens and you can insert forms into content and templates.
Ok I see..
The plugin look great. I will give it a try.
OMG! So excited! This is EXACTLY what I need, exactly when I needed it. Question though – what would be involved in limiting a users ability to view and edit ONLY their own posts? I’m attempting to make a much more extensive profile / customer account system for a site I’m working on, and am using custom post types for the different kinds of entries. It’s for a pet sitter’s website, so I need to have the client’s information (contact, emergency contact, veterinarian info), as well as allow logged in users to create pet profiles for each of their pets. Obviously we don’t want Susie to be able to view and edit the information for Jessica’s pets 😛
CRED will do this, in about 1-2 weeks from now, when it’s integrated with Types Access. Then, you’ll be able to choose who can edit ‘anything’ or ‘his content’. You’ll be able to select user types (like WordPress admin, writer, etc.) or specific users.
This way, you can make the people who submit content into ‘contributors’ and let them edit their own content. Administrators will be able to edit anything.
You can start by trying CRED now without this functionality and will it become available, without any change on your side, with Types Access integration.
Great! Will there be any additional cost for those who already own Types + Views?
Nope. You got it for free. When CRED moves to version 1.0, it will come with its own pricing and be available for separate purchase. If you have a Views account now, you’ll keep getting it for free. You help us with feedback and you get to use it without payment and no account expiration.
Yay! 🙂 Thank you!
Oh, forgot to ask – could we, if we wanted, use a plugin like gravity forms or formidable to create the forms for CRED? Or do we have to use the built-in form builder?
Sorry, I just now saw that you already addressed this question above. : /
CRED cannot import forms from GF or Formidable. They’re built completely differently and we cannot map the inputs. CRED works directly on fields that belong to posts. GF has general inputs, which you can map to posts manually, or using add-on plugins. That mapping is not 1:1.
Try to create a new form with CRED and let me know how it’s going. The setup wizard should help.
Does the built-in form builder have the capacity to deal with advanced conditional logic? That’s a big thing for what I’m doing, and a reason why I’d want to use something like gravity forms.
Not all right now, but it will be there by the time we reach 1.0. That’s why we released it early, to hear from you about what you actually need. If you can explain about that complex conditional logic, we’ll be able to understand a lot better and make sure that it does what’s needed.
Conditional field display is on our todo list and the next thing we’re starting. Real-world examples will greatly help.
Sounds fair?
Yup 🙂 Sounds fair. Where should we contribute feedback / suggestions in the meantime?
Best to start a new thread in our forum. There, we can also have code, email notifications and people who subscribe. Tag it as CRED. Thanks!
major street cred for this 😉
Can’t wait to get this running… I downloaded it, installed it on the latest version of WordPress and I can’t seem to get the CRED API Key function to work… I hit the button to get a key – and nothing happens… help!
No API keys. We made a little mistake by giving it the same slug as a different plugin from WPORG. Delete that other plugin and download CRED from the downloads section here. We’ll fix this glitch tomorrow morning, by assigning a different slug to our CRED plugin.
Amazing! Nice work with this plugin, it looks great! I hope I’ll be able to try it asap!
Keep going, you are doing awesome work!
Love where this is headed! I’ve been struggling to connect Gravity Forms with Custom Post Types and Views for a while now. My goal is to display a directory of facilities by state and have a form available for clients to submit a custom post to accomplish this. I’ve been waiting for Yoast to add part 3 of his Custom Post Types walk-through, but it looks like CRED will be an even better solution! Props guys!
Very glad to hear that. We’re just running through documentation now. I hope that the existing documentation that we have today will be enough for you to get started with this application. Sounds like it should be. Very soon, we’ll have the API fully documented and some full-length tutorials up too.
If you have ideas and suggestions, or just a simple question, best to start a new thread in the support forum. Tag is as CRED, so that it goes to the right developer.
Dear WP-Types and WP-Views Community:
It is obvious that many of us are more than excited about this new plugin. From the comments, I see that I am not the only one whose prayers were listened by the angels of the cyberspace.
Now here is my request: Please leave Amir alone (watch “leave Britney alone” in Youtube to make it more vivid), so that he can spend his time in the features that are still to come, instead of answering to the many “will it do this?, will it do that?” sort of comments.
Congratulations to you guys out the WP-Types, WP-Views, WP-Cred team. No doubt you are moving in the right direction.
Thanks 🙂
I’m a lot happier to be spending 1/2 day answering comments (some the same) than releasing something, that major, and not seeing any feedback. That happens too and it feels a lot worse than sitting next to the PC all night replying.
Plus it sort of goes along with the theme of wanting to hear what users want 🙂 Very exciting plugin…keep up the good work…looking forward to 1.0!
It says that activation triggered a fatal error..
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in /home/dncngdude/musicaltheatrepro.com/wp-content/plugins/cred/cred-loader.php on line 171
I expect the bugs, i am just excited to play with this and it won’t let me!
I even deactivated every other plugin except types and views and still couldn’t activate cred…
Right. It’s because you’re running PHP 5.2.x and we have a glitch on that version. We’ll update the download a little later today, so that CRED works correctly on PHP 5.2.x as well.
Really looking forward to testing it. Have the same error. Will it show the new update available in WP plugins?
From the sound of it, CRED is exactly the solution to a task I came across two days ago. Such a perfect timing, guys. Great work!
Good god I’m so excited to try that out, but getting that error too. Do update here when it’s ironed out!
I updated the download. Can you download again and try? Make sure that you delete the entire folder, as some files have changed names.
Hi Amir,
0.9.1 version is 103 Kb and has 3 folders in it, and 0.9 version was 1.55 MB and has 11 folders. When I upload version 0.9.1 to my website, it is not shown in the installed plugin list. Is there something wrong?
Thanks a lot, and congrats again!
Yes, sorry about that. One more glitch in the update mechanism. It’s fixed now. Can you download again?
This sound just fab, for a project I’m doing now! A second hand store, where visitors need to be able to ‘reserve’ a piece of clothes.
This is what I need to acheive:
I’m showing custom post type posts on an archive page, and for each post, I want to add a simple form with an email field and a “Reserve” button. When the button is clicked, I want the corresponding post to have a custom ‘reserved’ meta-data value set to true and a ‘reservedby’ field set to the email – and preferably via an AJAX request. Noting apart from the metadata values should be altered, and the post status must remain ‘published’. Is this achievable with CRED?
We didn’t yet add AJAX form submissions to CRED. It’s planned, but not included in this release. Apart from that, everything else should work and be pretty easy to implement.
marvelous! I’m very happy!
Buying that Views account was the best WP investment I’ve ever made. Maybe THE best investment I ever made 🙂 Thanks for keeping innovative, and providing us with the such OMNI-useful functionality!!
That’s so kind of you. Thanks a lot!
After reinstalling the plugin/file”cred-frontend-editor.0.9.zip” it says that activation triggered a different fatal error again
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_FUNCTION in wordpress/wp-content/plugins/cred-frontend-editor/classes/cred-form-builder.php on line 478
Looks like a PHP configuration issue. I’ve passed your email to Nikos, who’s developing CRED. He will contact you very soon and get this sorted out. Thanks for the patience and for helping us get to the bottom of this.
Can’t find an option to insert a filed, should I rather use a generic field of the proper type, and then add hidden as a class parameter, and hide it using CSS?
Can you start a thread about this in our forum? Write that it’s about CRED and Nikos will handle it. It’s getting difficult to manage technical issues on these comments. When you do that, explain what custom fields that post has and how their are setup (with Types or somehow else).
sure.
The theme has encountered a problem that it cannot recover from. Please use the following information to try to resolve the problem.
Error Code: php_code_error:4:/home/nathans/public_html/wp-content/plugins/cred-frontend-editor/classes/cred-form-builder.php:478:syntax error, unexpected T_FUNCTION
Message: A fatal code error occurred.
This is probably a PHP configuration issue, which escaped our QA. Nikos, the plugin developer will contact you directly (to your email) and have this sorted out. Thanks for the patience. We’ll iron this out quickly.
Thank you Admir and the WP-Types and views, Cred team – You guys rock! Bug or no bug – we have complete confidence in your team and really appreciate your hard work!
thank you!!!!
Lately I’ve been working on some web applications using a combination of Types, Views and GF. A problem that occurs a the very beginning is that in a lot of caes you want the use to have his own page with showing only the content that he submitted.
You also want that only that user has acces to that page.
Untill now I have to use a plugin that restricts user access to a page and an addon to GF that only shows data the user submitted himself.
Amir can you see a way in which CRED can make such a web app run smoother with CRED?
Look into our Types Access add-on plugin on your downloads page. Those features are being added to CRED next.
The development of Types, Views and CRED are fantastic, thanks.
Paginated forms, like you can do in GF, would be a nice addition, if it’s not already possible.
That’s a good suggestion. I’m adding it to our list of things to add a bit down the road.
Does cred support creating child post types like how we do inside wp-types?
Not yet, but we’re getting there. The reason we didn’t start on this yet is that we’re not sure what the use-cases will be. Can you give an example for what you would do, on front-page submissions with parent/child relationships?
Not sure if you want to hear another use-case? Right now I am building a website that allows Shopkeepers (post-type 1) to enter folders (post-type 2), ads (post-type 3) or offers (post-type 4). If a shopkeeper wants to add an offer, this offer can include a coupon (post-type 5) and/or a code (post-type 6).
I bought CRED esp. to help me with this complex structuring, to find out it does not (yet) allow relationships between post-types. Any indication as to a time-frame or should I look for other solutions?
Yes, very interesting and I appreciate the feedback. CRED already has basic support for parent / child relationship:
https://toolset.com/documentation/user-guides/cred-forms-for-child-content/
This does not (yet) include groups of fields using parent / child relationship. We’re working on it right now and it will be available in the near future. This month is a little slow with holidays and vacations, so it’s not going to be ready in December. This, and a bunch of new good stuff, should be ready in January’s release.
Great that you asked.
I have many instructors and all of them have different timings (classes)
The classes have their own data (Location, Day, Time, Fee)
So there are 2 post-types – Instructor & Class
Each instructor can have many classes, so this is our usage, but we have a problem storing time in wp-types and viewing on wp-views so even if we manage to iron the parent/child, we still need Time to be ironed out.
Thanks. This makes sense. We already have a ‘Time’ field on our todo list for the next release for Types and Views.
About the parent / child relationship, some of the logic that you’re describing will probably have to be done using a little PHP code. We’re including hooks that will allow you to set data according to your content. So, when an instructor goes to add a class, your code will set the parent field for that instructor. We’ll make this easy to do in CRED, but it will require a few lines of code.
The reason for not fully automating this is that we cannot predict the different logic that every different site will require. If we do that, we’ll end up with a huge GUI that nobody can understand. We’ll help you do it right and maybe get a nice use-case of this. I hope that this is OK.
Thank you! I’ll be looking forward for it 😀
Well, just posted a ticket. I downloaded, tried to install via wp admin plugin install and upload via ftp to my plugin files. Nothing. The wp admin plugin installer stated no valid plugin files and just nothing after I ftp’d.
Some install instructions would be helpful.
Thanks for moving the discussion to our forum. I answered there.
Great news Amir,
It looks like CRED is something many people were waiting for (80 comments by now). To be true, thats what I expected.
I definitely give it a try in a near future. I’ve been doing a couple of project with front-end posting, editing, deleting of posts, comments, userdata and I wonder how CRED can support me there. At the moment – it ounds very interesting.
Great. I’m glad to see you’re interested. Take it for a spin and let us know what you think. Your feedback has always been very helpful.
Love it! You guys really keep pushing the bar and CRED is nothing short of awesome! I’m downloading now and will have more feedback once I’ve had a chance to really kick the tires 😉
Great. BTW, we’re going to release weekly updates for CRED. The upcoming release will address all the feedback that we received this week (which is a lot) and a bunch of new features. I’ll write about it and tell what’s new.
Well, all I can say is that if Chris RAULT says that something is good, then I know that it is better than good. We look forward to applying CRED to our websites.
This looks great! I haven’t tried it yet, but just reading through the documentation there is one thing I’m very confused by… Is there no way to have a single form that can both create AND edit content?
I’d love to use this for clients to populate custom posts that are frankly very complicated and for which the backend can be overwhelming, but I’d hope they could edit/update that same content after creation and it seems like I’d have to build a second form just for that?
You would need to create 2 forms, one to create new content and the other to edit. They can look exactly the same. If you want, you can copy the form content from the new-content form to the edit-content form and the two would appear identical.
The upcoming CRED release has a form duplication feature, which can make this even easier.
We separated ‘new’ and ‘edit’ forms intentionally, as they have different settings in the backend.
Thanks Amir. I figured that might be the case and how you describe it doesn’t sound difficult at all. I’d suspect I’m not alone in wondering about this and would humbly suggest the documentation cover such a use case.
Thanks guys, I realy love this plugin.
Will be available an Embedding feature for CRED like are now available for Views and Types ?
Yes. CRED will have an embedded mode, like Types and Views do. This will take a few more weeks, as it’s probably the last item that we add, but it will be included.
I get a warning about using caching, and a link to find out how to prevent caching in forms ….. which doesn’t work. What is the warning supposed to be telling me to do?
Also, really needs to be able to handle child posts.
Otherwise a really great development!
We added that warning as extra caution and didn’t yet add the documentation page for it. Turns out that it’s not needed. We’re removing that warning altogether from CRED. Processing for parent fields is coming. It’s not going to be in this week’s release, but it’s coming before CRED 1.0.
I’m looking to build a client management system where several members of the staff and clients staff can access certain parts of the project page and make edits to the ” project status field ( radio button ) and the page would keep a log of all updates /edits that will be displayed on same page..( ideally these would be instantaneous ( ajax ) I would also like to set up some sort of sms/email notification for certain fields when they reach a certain stage in the project workflow ( created and defined with types and views ) then predetermined people would be notified with link and update info… Then after all of this is done allow users to view all projects they are working on, assigned to, revisions needed and/or notifications in a nice table format where they can also do quick editing like mark some projects done or assign/tag someone else to a project and so forth…
Hummmmm…. I’m a complete newbie but I see all of this as being doable and think the combination of types, views and cred and access would do the trick – Am i dreaming? Perhaps I should keep my day job!
Seems that this is exactly what CRED will be doing for you. The current release is still not fully featured. We’ll be adding more functionality in the coming weeks as we approach CRED 1.0. I recommend that you download CRED now and start building this application. Let us know what you need help with and what other functionality you could use.
We’ll have a much better product if we get early use-case information and can see which power features can help.
CRED 0.9.2 is out, so please start your comments on the new version on that blog post.
Something wrong with zip file on new version. Errors out when trying to activate.
Hi, i need to create a custom role to which allow the user to edit his own post. i follow the instruction
type -> user access and control -> custom role -> new role… when i click okay. nothing happen. could pse tell me what’s wrong?
regards
tony
Can you post your question on our forum – https://toolset.com/forums/. We have people there that will be able to help you.