Website development strategy WordPress

designbuildtest comments:

Many thanks Remy. Given the scenario I describe above, what would be the key plugins you would choose for this project?

Remy comments:

Restrict Content Pro can be a good alternative for the membership part. It's maintained by a great team, as lot of add-ons if needed and great support.

As for the front end, I'm used to Gravity Forms, but Formidable Pro looks good. I don't really like WP User Frontend Pro, I add to use it once a client website and it was kind of messy.

designbuildtest comments:

Thanks Remy. Restrict Content Pro looks very powerful. In this instance however either Gravityforms User Registration Add On or Formidable Pro User Registration Add will probably do the trick. My greater concern is around frontend posting or editing. Any suggestions/advice?

Remy comments:

Frontend posting and editing is absolutely possible with both. You might need some custom code to add tinymce for the post content with GF, but other than that I think you will be covered

designbuildtest comments:

I've found frontend editing with GF (via the [[LINK href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/gravity-forms-post-updates/"]]Gravity Forms Post Update[[/LINK]] plugin) a little unsatisfactory to be honest. I am also fed up with a lack of native Custom Post type support in GF. For these reasons I actually purchased Formidable Pro. Don't get me wrong, GF is great, but not for frontend post editing. Is there anything else out there other than GF or Formidable that might be worth investigating?

Remy comments:

Ninja forms and its add-ons can also be worth a look, I didn't test it myself but a fellow dev told me its good

designbuildtest comments:

Yip, Ninja Forms looks pretty impressive. Was hard to choose between Ninja Forms and Formidable Pro, but I ended up choosing the later based on price. The support at Formidable Pro has been top-notch so far. GF have some real competition in this space now.

designbuildtest comments:

Cheers John. My requirements are fairly straight forward I hope. The biggie is the front-end post creation and editing. Other than a wee bit of validation on the title field, I need a content box (not even TinyMCE - want to keep things really, really basic), thumbnail, excerpt, custom taxonomy support plus a couple of custom meta fields.

I've actually already got a working prototype up and running using Formidable Pro. The major reservation I have is around the extra overhead (trivial probably, but overhead nevertheless) in the database with form entries sitting alongside the actual posts.

I'd love to role a Gravityforms solution (I've done plenty with GF in the past), but this is one area they really need to improve on relative to Ninja and FP (native front-end CPT creation and editing that is).

Also, with what I am doing I'd really like to drop the form plugin dependency entirely.

I've tried to keep form requirements super simple and was hoping someone could maybe point me in the direction of a comprehensive online tutorial for front-end post creation and editing.

Any further thoughts you might have very much appreciated.

Cheers again

John Cotton comments:

Front end creation of CPTs and taxonomy relationships is really easy.

Here's some typical code (this is for an ajax-posted form but the principle is the same)


$project_id = intval( $_POST['project_id'] );

if( wp_verify_nonce( $_POST['ajax_flag'], NONCE ) ) {
$response = array();

$post_status = isset( $_POST['project-publish'] ) ? strip_tags($_POST['project-publish']) : 'publish';

$post = array(
'ID' => $project_id,
'post_content' => strip_tags( $_POST['project-description'] ),
'post_title' => strip_tags( $_POST['project-title'] ),
'post_status' => $post_status,
'post_type' => 'bc_project',
'post_author' => get_current_user_id(),
'post_date' => date( 'Y-m-d H:i' ),
'post_date_gmt' => get_gmt_from_date( date('Y-m-d H:i') )
);

if( $project_id == 0 ) {
$project_id = wp_insert_post( $post );
$msg = __( 'Your project has been added!', 'xxxx' );
} else {
$project_id = wp_update_post( $post );
$msg = __( 'Your project has been updated!', 'xxxx' );
}

if( !is_wp_error( $project_id ) ) {
update_post_meta( $project_id, '_word_count', $_POST['project-word-count-field'] );

if( isset($_POST['project-featured']) ) {
update_post_meta( $project_id, '_featured', $_POST['project-featured'] );
do_action( 'set_project_featured', $project_id );
}

wp_set_object_terms( $project_id, array_map( 'intval', (array) $_POST['project-budget'] ), 'project_budget' );
wp_set_object_terms( $project_id, array_map( 'intval', (array) $_POST['project-budget-type'] ), 'project_budget_type' );
wp_set_object_terms( $project_id, array_map( 'intval', (array) $_POST['project-category'] ), 'project_type' );

$response['project_id'] = $project_id;
$response['files'] = bc_attach_files( $project_id );

$response['notification'] = array( 'msg' => $msg );

} else {
$response['notification'] = array( 'msg' => __( 'Hmmm....something has gone wrong...we are looking into it!', 'xxxx' ), 'state' => 'alert-danger' );
}

wp_send_json_success( $response );

}


designbuildtest comments:

Great! Many thanks John. I think this is starting to look more like what I was hoping for.
Although I wasn't expecting working code examples, I wonder if it would be worth opening a new question when this one ends where I ask for actual usable code? Any thoughts?

John Cotton comments:

Sure, although that is "actual, real code"!

Swap the meta key, post type and taxonomy names and it will work with whatever you need.