Gravity Forms + Custom Post Type addon

By default, Gravity Forms allows you to create posts through a form. It doesn't have support for custom post types at the moment though, in part because a wonderful plugin was already created that allows for this. This plugin, aptly named Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types can be downloaded from WordPress.org.

Once you have both Gravity Forms and this plugin activated, you can start creating a form. The first step is to make the form fill our custom post type. We start with creating a form and dragging in a title field:

The title field can be found in the posts field section of Gravity Forms field, below the advanced fields:

Once you've added this input field and given it a name, go to the advanced section of its edit block, you'll see an option to save as post type, this has been added by the afore mentioned plugin:

You check the box and select the custom post type you want to use, in my case, WPSEO Themes. Now we start adding the form. We need a couple of different types of values:

• The title: done.
• The "description", which will just be the body text, so you can easily drag in the Body input field.
• An image, which should be saved as the featured image too, more on that below.
• Several custom fields, more below too.

Adding a featured image trough the form

This is actually pretty easy: drag in an image field and click edit, you'll see something like the screen below:

As you can see, setting the image as featured image is as easy as ticking the box. It's wise to also ask for a description if you don't know what's going to be on the image. In my case, it's a screenshot of the theme, so I won't bother and just set the alt tag automatically.

Adding custom fields through Gravity Forms

The next step is to add the several custom fields we need. In my case I had 5, but you can have as much as you want. You start by dragging a Custom Field input into your form. Once you have that, you click edit and you select the appropriate custom field type:

In this case, I'm asking for the theme URL, so I select website, but there are all sorts of options you can choose from, as you can see. Now here comes the tricky part, you need to set the name of your custom field. You should go into your Types -> Custom Fields page and check the second value below the custom field title:

That's the name of your custom field, but you should prefix it with "wpcf-", because that's the Types plugin naming convention, which prevents its custom fields from clashing with other ones.

Of course, if you created a custom field group from already existing custom fields you don't need to prefix the custom field name.

True / false or "boolean" input fields

Some of your custom values might be checkboxes, they're either on or off, true or false. That's called a boolean value in math / developers language, but for you, it's really simple. Just create a custom field type "checkboxes", and go into it's settings:

Be sure to check the "enable values" box and set the value to just "1". That way, if checked, Gravity Forms will save it as value "1" and the Types plugin will "get it".

Deciding on workflow

Now, once you've used the above info to finish your form, you need to decide on a workflow. On the post title field, the one whose advanced settings we used to save this input as a custom post type, we now go to the "normal" properties:

As you can see, you can set a default post author and a post status. Now in my case the author will be me in most cases, as nobody will be logged in. However, if you have enabled registration on your site, you can force people to be logged in before even being able to use this form, by going into your forms advanced settings and checking the "require user to be logged in" checkbox:

This allows for all sorts of workflows, find one that suits your site!

Conclusion

We still haven't written a single line of code, yet we've already created a custom post type and created a form that allows people to submit custom post types to us.

So, one more thing to check of off the to-do list:

1. Creating a custom post type + custom fields.
2. Creating a form through which people can submit themes that fills this post type.
3. Creating a browsable interface for this post type.

In my next post, I'll explain how to use the Views plugin to create "views" for this post type and unveil the finished product!

Use Gravity Forms to submit custom post types is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• If I have just made changes to my WP site, does it help to toggle the cache plugin?

  Absolutely. My SEO plugin force refreshes the cache because otherwise people start emailing me that stuff doesn't work when it works perfectly. On sites with more traffic though, you could also just leave the cache as is and wait it out a bit.

• How do I move a WordPress site, changing its permalinks but keeping the social numbers counts (post tweets/likes/shares)?

  The answer to this is an unfortunate but resounding: you don't. I've written a tutorial on moving WordPress to a new domain quite a while ago, but you simply can't keep those stats. All the more reason to think long and hard about moving domains...

• My buddy Richard thought he was funny, and asked: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a wouldchuck could chuck wood?

  The answer is simple, of course: a woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

• Will you be focusing on wordpress for the rest of your life? If not what do you think will be the reason why you change your focus?

  I might be smart, but I'm no sightseer. Also, while I work with WordPress a lot, a lot of my time is also spent on consulting and website reviews (which we do for all sorts of sites).

• What is the best practice to SEO a WordPress.com site? Is it even possible?

  Of course there are things you could do on a WordPress.com site, some themes there are better than others and you can do a whole lot content wise. The minute you start asking questions like that though, you should really consider getting a self-hosted WordPress.org install and taking control of your own destiny. You'll reach a point where you'll want to do more and WordPress.com doesn't allow you to do that and the longer you wait, the harder it is to move, so, move now.

• When do you think that WordPress is going to completely rewrite their code base so it's an actual CMS instead of a hacked together glorified blogging system?

  I find I get that question quite a lot and it annoys me. WordPress is being rewritten all the time. Check out the development that happens on Trac. Most of the people who ask questions like that haven't had a decent look at the codebase for ages. WordPress IS way more than a glorified blogging system already and if there are specific issues you have with the way it's coded, patches are welcome!

• If you start working on a WordPress blog for a client and there are no plugins installed, which ones do you always install?

  A couple: my own WordPress SEO & Google Analytics plugins, W3 Total Cache and usually Gravity Forms. Of course each site is different so there'll be more plugins after that depending on that site's and site owners needs and wants.

• What do you think has more value? A good domain name or good link building?

  Good link building, any day, every day. You see, domain names, especially so called "exact match domain names" are bound to be devalued at some point. Good link building will always create traffic to your site, just from those links alone, so that's always worth while. Those links also bring in rankings but in really good link building, that's often just a side effect. I recently talked about Eric Ward's mailing list, you should check out that post.

• Your SEO plugin places a canonical tag on every generated page and I have an ongoing argument with a co-worker about that. He says that this tag should only be on pages that contain duplicate content and that it is intended to 'tell' the searchbot where to look for the original content. Googling around doesn't clarify a lot. Could you please tell your reasons behind placing it on every page?

  I get this discussion a lot. The thing is, if I was 100% sure that a URL could only be accessed through that specific URL with no query parameters added, I might not add a canonical. There's nothing against it, but it'd just be a bit cleaner. However, these URLs:

  http://www.example.com/

  http://www.example.com/?campaign=email

  Are essentially the same for a WordPress install in 99% of the cases. However, they're not the same for Google and other search engines. So, if I wouldn't add canonical, the link value of the second URL would be waisted and, in fact, you'd have a competing duplicate content URL in the search results. That's why I add it to all pages.

• I noticed you don't use a comment system like disqus or intense debate. Would be nice to hear your thoughts about whether we should or should not use a comment system in WordPress.

  If I were to use a comment system, I'd use Facebook comments. The benefits of that and the fact that it gets way less spam are quite high. So far I've decided not to do that yet because a couple of my regular visitors and active commenters actually don't have Facebook accounts. Also, my comment redirect plugin doesn't work with those systems, which I think is a pity.

  I'll say one thing: the amount of work I have to do to keep this blog spam free is nothing short of ridiculous. Read this post to see what I mean.

That's it, what do you think, should I do this more often?

Questions and Answers is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Last friday I was telling my buddy Remkus de Vries, known as @DeFries on Twitter, that I was almost done with the internationalization support for my WordPress SEO plugin. He told me that I should be using GlotPress, which is a collaborative, web-based software translation tool maintained by some of the people behind WordPress. I concurred and asked him to set it up for me.

He did and he wrote a post about it: How to use GlotPress for your translations. After a bit of work on my side on getting a registration form going, I tweeted about my GlotPress being there on translate.yoast.com. Within 20 minutes about 10 people had registered and started translating. I was very excited about that and decided to look into it a bit better by the following morning, when 14 people in total had signed up already.

Because I could see this becoming unmanageable quite soon, I decided to create a mailing list for the contributors. As you'll see when you've read Remkus' post I listed above, we use a WordPress install on /register/ to manager the users. This allows me to use Gravity Forms, along with its User Registration add-on, to allow people to register. Because I built it that way, it was a piece of cake to add the Mailchimp add-on and make sure all new translator were connected to the mailing list as well.

Be sure that when you set it up like this too, you make the language people want to translate into a variable in MailChimp too, so later on you can easily segment on that, by emailing just the people who are translating your plugin(s) into Polish, for instance.

The amount of people working on this has surprised me. I've tweeted about it twice and so far, 31 people have signed up and are actively translating into 12 different languages, so far translating 2568 sentences!

Your turn?

Are you using WordPress in your native language? Would you want to contribute some of your time to help translate my plugins into your native language? Then register here, you'll receive instructions from there. If your language isn't listed yet, please allow me some time to enable that language and from then on your good to go, looking forward to seeing my plugins run in more languages then were speaking on the tower of Babel!

(Collaboratively) Translating Yoast Plugins is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

What happens now is that when you send me an email through my contact form, you've got an option to subscribe to my newsletter, if you check that, you'll receive an opt-in email to subscribe to my newsletter and ta-daa: you're subscribed! Best thing about it? That whole process took about 5 minutes to setup:

1. Downloading the MailChimp add-on from the Gravity Forms support site
2. Entering my MailChimp account details in the backend
3. Selecting the proper list from a dropdown, selecting the proper form from my dropdown
4. Matching the fields and setting the optional "Opt-in condition"

It looks like this:

Pretty nifty stuff huh? (You'll need a developer license for this add-on btw, just so you know.)

Gravity Forms Widget

My Gravity Forms Widget also has had several updates over the last months to fix some bugs here and there, such as tabindex issues and issues with other plugins colliding into the form. The widget interface now looks like is shown below. You can download the latest version here. To use it just upload it to your plugins folder and activate it.

It seems Gravity Forms upcoming version 1.4 is going to be awesome yet again, so if you haven't yet, you really should get on this bandwagon and start using it. It rocks. If you want to read more, you might want to read about or listen to Gravity Forms on Press This (when our podcast was still called that way).

Gravity Forms (Widget) update is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There's a small issue though: it lacks a bit of functionality that people who were used to my WordPress contact form were really used too, and sometimes even relying on. My plugin added referrer data and the search keyword(s) used to the notification emails. To solve this issue I've written a small "add-on" plugin that adds just that data to notification emails. You can download it here.

There's another tiny thing that people needed: a widget that allows you to easily embed the forms in your sidebar(s). I made another add-on plugin that adds just that.

It should be noted that this widget currently does not add any scripts or style tags, so should your form depend on those, it won't work at the moment unless you load those scripts into your theme manually. Other than that, it works fine!

You can download the Gravity Forms widget plugin here, just upload, activate and use the widget. Grab the updated Gravity Forms widget here.

I've given the code for both these add-ons to the Gravity Forms guys, so they might end up adding these features to upcoming releases. If you've got anything else you want from Gravity Forms, I'd love to hear it in the comments!

Gravity Forms Widget + Extra’s is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I wanted to talk a bit more about Gravity Forms though. I have my own contact form plugin, and yet, I have decided to go with Gravity Forms for all the contact forms on this site, and it's now the only contact form we use for all our client projects.

It is that, for several reasons. Most important: it's bloody easy to use. No programming needed anymore if the client wants another line of input added, needs a captcha or a file upload, wants a drop down or even wants people to be able to submit content directly to the site through a form.

Second: it stores all contact entries in the database, and has an easy to use interface to search through and export them into something like, for instance, a csv file. This way, if the notification email goes wrong, there's still a copy on the server.

There's loads more, as I said, both my contact form and my hire me form are now built with Gravity Forms, so I can only say: go get it. Carl was so kind as to leave a promo code especially for Press This listeners, which I don't think he'll mind if I share here: use PRESSTHIS as a coupon code for an instant 20% discount!

Gravity Forms on Press This is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!