I am trying to: Create a form whereby visitors could put in an absentee bid for an auction lot in the forthcoming auctions catalogue.
The website I am building is for an auction company.
We are using types to create a CPT for all the auction lots that will be appearing in the forthcoming auctions.
My question is, is CRED the right tool for the job if I want to create an absentee bidder form where the visitor will be able to put in an absentee bid for the lot he or she is looking at.
This would be a regular enquiry form which will include the CPT custom fields in the enquiry which would function as their absentee bid.
The way I envision it to work is that Absentee bid will be its own CPT and the user will be able to submit their absentee bid which will be stored as a post which we can feed back in to our existing system. This post however will need to be unaccessible by general visitors, so only viewable by Admin.
Or would I have better luck with something like gravity forms?
Thanks in advance.
Josh.
Thank you for contacting Toolset support, I'd be delighted to assist!
Sounds like a cool project! Auctions have always fascinated me.
The big difference here would be customizability. It may be a little easier going with GF however if you need any customization with Gravity Forms, it could be a rough ride.
I envision:
1. Setup CPT for Absentee Bids
2. Add all required Custom Fields to the CPT
3. Create a CRED New Post form to submit bids, set the post visibility to Private
4. Set an email notification when a Bid is placed
You could do other things such as limit the CRED form to specific user groups, such as "Auctioners" instead of it being publically visible (as with GF) with Access plugin or even build a frontend with Views to display the bids in a custom manner.
In the end though, it's up to you! Let me know if there is anything else I can help with or what way you go!
Thank you for your reply Ross.
The form will be viewable by the public as they will be putting in their absentee bids, so hiding is from specific users is not an issue. Just the posts created will need to be hidden but I think I have a handle on that.
My question is more along the lines of how would I include the post data that they are on into the form submitted. In other words if a visitor was on a particular painting and wanted to put the absentee bid in for that specific painting, would we be able to input that data into the post the form creates?
Howdy Josh!
This would be as easy as creating a CRED form for child content as you can see here:
https://toolset.com/documentation/user-guides/cred-forms-for-child-content/
Just as the example publishes a specific Book Review, you can also have a CRED form to publish a specific Absentee Bid. The cool thing is, with Views - you can display the bids on the Parent Auction page on the frontend and limit the "block" to only certain permission levels to see with Access!
So you end up like this:
CRED providing a button on the auction to "submit absentee bid" -> https://toolset.com/documentation/user-guides/cred-forms-for-child-content/
A content area on the frontend, on the auction page which displays submitted absentee bids per item with Views - yes on the actual Auction item page
With Access, only certain user groups can see the absentee bid area on the Auction pages! Normal visitors would be none the wiser. -> Use the "Access" button to insert your conditionals in Views when creating your Auction item content template
Sounds exciting doesn't it?
Hi Ross,
Sorry about the late reply, I moved my focus over to another project in the interim.
I must say working with custom post types and views has really opened my eyes to the possibilities!
I will get to this module of the site in a few days.
I have another question about something else but will open a new ticket for that.
All right, let's close this one then
