How would you build this with wordpress? WordPress
- SOLVED
It is for recording jobs for clients that have been completed.
So the website owner/admin logins in and fills out a form in the admin area, containing:
start time of job
end time of job
address of job
distance to job
name of client
description of the job
reason for the job e.g. faulty
Then I want to be able to email the details to the client for their specific job</strong>
I also need it so that the job can be printed off
At the end of the week it should be possible to print of a summary of the jobs completed for the week, or a summary of jobs completed for one specific client.
What plugins would be best for this? How would you do this?
Does this site need an SSL certificate? The job details are only contained in the backend of the site once logged in and not shown on the front end.
Could gravity forms do this?
Thanks!
Answers (3)
Kyle answers:
The most cost effective solution I can think of (i.e. leveraging existing plugins):
-The Events Calendar can be used for your bullet points (in your case 'events' are 'jobs'). It offers everything there, including the ability to manage simple custom fields as you need.
-The plugin has very easy templating that will allow you to hide all frontend activity by simply moving copies to your theme and erasing them.
-For email there are a few ways to do it, you could actually just use a simple sharing plugin with The Events Calendar, to email the 'event' (job) directly to them. In your case you'll likely need something a bit more custom. It would be hard to really send details when their are no frontend aspects to show them... so you'd have to write something tying into your custom fields that generates a custom email each time.
-As for printing and managing them, you can do that through export plugins and filtering plugins. You could export the weekly jobs to excel for easy management. There are tons of CSV plugins for Wordpress.
The above is all DIY stuff that even beginners could figure out. That isn't to say you can't streamline this to any degree you need. E.g. you could make an email filter, that upon generating a job it grabs the email and the details of the job and auto send a one time email on publish. The same can be said for printing, distance calculation, exporting... the works.
That said, there are more than one ways to skin a cat! This is just the first thing I came up with. Let me know if you need any help with implementation, should you decide to go this route.
Matthew Pollard comments:
Thanks that is very detailed and useful. Could gravity forms do this do you know?
Matthew Pollard comments:
Also, could it be a good idea to use custom post types for jobs and then send an email automatically when the admin 'publishes' the custom post type?
Kyle comments:
Absolutely!
You could use the Gravity Forms Date Fields and just create one for each. Then in the backend you can filter entries by a certain form field value. So you could maybe put in a user's email address and then filter by those to see all their jobs and then print right from that screen. Likewise, you can set up notifications to be sent on submission to that same email address that contains any fields you want to show them. GF also has an export screen where you can export all entries for a certain time period.
Further still you would have no problem protecting that form on the frontend to only you.
Also, on the SSL note... that is up to you. It would help protect submissions and logins but is not required.
Kyle comments:
You can do that if you'd like and there are GF add-ons for CPTs that make that easy. Something like this might work (may need to get pro version) [[LINK href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/publish-post-email-notification/"]]https://wordpress.org/plugins/publish-post-email-notification/[[/LINK]]
I personally would prefer to use the Gravity Forms notifications, but I'm sure that would be fine
Matthew Pollard comments:
Thanks! So a few final questions just to clarify please:
1) I can enter one email address for each job, and then setup gravity forms to save each job as a custom post type?
2) Using the specific email address entered for each job, it is then possible to email the job details at the click of a button?
3) It's possible to print each custom post type/ job so that it is arranged neatly and professionally?
Thanks so much for the help!
Kyle comments:
1) Yes, you'll need this too to make it easy h[[LINK href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/gravity-forms-custom-post-types/"]]ttps://wordpress.org/plugins/gravity-forms-custom-post-types/[[/LINK]] plus you're favorite cpt management plugin. I use this one [[LINK href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-post-type-ui/"]]https://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-post-type-ui/[[/LINK]] it is probably the most basic of the CPT managers
2) Yes, it is. Gravity Forms makes notifications very easy, and you can drop in field data from your form with merge tags without needing to code anything ever [[LINK href="http://www.gravityforms.com/features/notifications/"]]http://www.gravityforms.com/features/notifications/[[/LINK]]
3) When a form is submitted it generates an "entry". You'll be able to filter and print entries to a basic degree, as well as save as CSVs. As far as "arranging" them or customizing the appearance to be "professional" that may be trickier.. there is a pdf add-on that would allow you to generate a more professional template https://wordpress.org/plugins/gravity-forms-pdf-extended/ but for the most part this is very simple by default.
Let me know if you have anymore questions. - Kyle
Arnav Joy answers:
Hi,
I can develop custom plugin for this.
And it will not required ssl.
Matthew Pollard comments:
I'm looking at doing the work myself. I'm new to web development/ wordpress and looking for some advice to complete this. I'm doing the work for free to get some experience. Can you recommend a plugin that can meet my requirements please?
Sébastien | French WordpressDesigner answers:
Use "advanced custom post type", it's perfect for this job