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:
- 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 
which 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.
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:
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.
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.
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