Creating Automation in WordPress Submission Forms

Lately I have been re-doing many of the contact forms on all of my blogs to help improve automation and providing information to me the moment the form is filled out to save time.  These automated and comprehensive forms help my sites run more efficiently and automate some of the user contributed content that some of the sites that I run have.

For The Chefs Cookbook for example this site allows guests to submit original recipes and now the Formidable Pro form is updated to allow for separate sections, rich text formatting and will automatically turn the recipe into a post to review and publish.

For my Poetry Blog Wanderer Thoughts Poetry where I encourage guest posts to share their work and link back to their poetry book, websites, blogs…etc I also have a similar type of submit a poem form implemented.

For my GiveawayContests.net blog this site has a submit your own giveaway feature which includes you adding all the event information of an online giveaway or contest and it will publish after I manually validate all of the information is valid first. 

These are ways that save time instead of the usual email that comes in which requires a 2-3 email exchange or a doc attachment to read and sort through and makes my life a little easier and allows me to respond to requests a little faster.

DragonBlogger gets too many guest post submissions that vary in quality from very poor to decent, so I don’t allow any auto publication of posts for guest posting on DragonBlogger, but the form will allow a doc file attachment which allows me to review and continue on the next step of approving or requiring the author to edit the post further, or outright reject it if it is very poor quality.

When you run 7 blogs you have to automate as much as possible and it was only a matter of time before I build my Formidable Pro forms to be more feature rich and functional.  I also did something like change custom Post Title which required some custom code changes in the form to achieve this as it isn’t a built in function.