Making a Guest Post Submission Form To Upload Visitors Blog Content

Accepting guest posts from different site visitors is a great way to add content to your blog written in a variety of different styles & personalities.

You could easily ask your authors to email you the content and accept it using a standard contact form.

Another way would be to use a highly customizable form plugin which includes drag and drop fields specifically created for WordPress.

The form plugin i am talking about is Gravity Forms.

Post Fields

This plugin includes several field categories, one of which is Post Fields.

These fields include the standard WordPress fields which you use when you create a new post yourself like:Post Fields

  • Title
  • Category
  • Tags
  • Post Body
  • Image
  • Excerpt
  • Custom field

All you need to do is click these fields and they are added to your form.

There’s NO:

  • Coding
  • No experience
  • No technical skills needed

Advanced Fields

These fields are advanced BUT so easy to use as all you do is click the ones you want added to your form.

They include more options Advanced Fieldswhich you can add to your form like:

  • Name
  • Website
  • Email Address

You could include a File Upload option so your guest author simple uploads the completed content but thats a problem with alignment of images and image url’s being hosted on thier site.

Its far easier to allow the content to be submitted as a post draft.

Then there’s the standard fields

Standard Fields

Simply click the fields you need to create your form and in a few minutes you have a totally custom form which you can accept new content in the form of blog posts.Standard Fields

Once submitted, these guest posts are posted as drafts for easy review before you publish them to your live site.

No need to allow your users access to the backend admin panel of your site or worry about spammers registering as new users.

More Fields

Need more options than the standard Gravity forms plugin offers?

Easily install another plugin addon that adds more fields to gravity forms like:

  • PayPal and PayPal Pro
  • WordPress User Generation
  • Aweber & MailChimp
  • Authorize.net

Display Content Submission Form

Simply click the form icon above your editor, choose which form you want to display and the form tag gets embedded in a post, page or widget.

Post Title Fields

Here can select which author you want your guest post content to be links to and select whether you want the content to saved a s draft or published automatically.

You can also map forms that create posts to custom post types and allow logged in users to submit new content for preview, drafts or publication.

New Post Title Form Fields

Personally, what i have done for some guest authors is to create a separate user profile for each with their image and bio so they can submit new content for quick review before i publish it. I also like to add internal links if they haven’t already.

Publish User Generated Posts

Check your Post drafts for new submissions, preview them, make any changes you want and then click publish.

This is by far the easiest way to create highly customizable forms without any stress because you don’t need any technical knowledge. Try doing all this with contact form 7 and any other form plugin.

Reviewing your guest authors content is like previewing your own posts before you click Publish. You can also add internal and external links.

Updating Your Form

If you need to make changes or add more fields simply edit the form and click save. Your existing form will be updated dynamically without any need to reinsert the shortcode.

Where To Get Gravity Forms

If you liked this article and want to create your own form for accepting guest post content buy Gravity forms.


Comments

2 responses to “Making a Guest Post Submission Form To Upload Visitors Blog Content”

  1. Emily Avatar

    This is one of the best ideas I’ve heard in a long time. I’m implementing it on my review site, now. Is there a way to limit the size of an image uploaded through Gravity Forms? I’m concerned about hosting a gazillion images. What are your thoughts on overloading a site with images?

    1. Brad Dalton Avatar
      Brad Dalton

      Hi Emily.

      The only way to restrict upload file size limits is by changing the limits in your php.ini file.

      Once you receive the uploads you can publish them or save them and then delete the submissions

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