User generated content with Gravity Forms

By Neil on May 9, 2014

Gravity Forms are amazingly versatile, and one of the things you can do with them is allow users (i.e. website visitors) to submit content straight to your website via a front-end form. This could be useful for example if you wanted visitors to submit questions that will be shown on the website, or perhaps you want users to contribute to new posts but do not want to give them dashboard access to your website.

Gravity forms lets you add a form to a page and when people fill it out and submit it a new post is created. You can decide whether or not this post is automatically published or whether it remains a draft post until you check it out later.

Click here to visit Gravity Forms and check out more features.

Step by step tutorial

The first thing we need to do is create a new form, which is done via your WordPress dashboard. From the forms link on the left hand menu select New Form and go ahead and give your form a title and then create your form.

Since this form is going to be used to create a new post on the website, we’ll add a Title field to our new form, which is found under the Post Fields tab on the right side of the form creator screen. Also in this example we need a Body field since this is going to be the main content of the new post, and we will also add a Tags field.

Now click to edit the Title field that we first included in the form, and you will see a few options. You can choose to have posts in Draft, Pending, or Published once the form is submitted, you can choose a default author for the posts, and you can select default categories for the posts. Also, if you have different content templates you can assign them to this form. Make sure you update any changes made to your form.

You now need to embed this form in a page, and this is easily done by clicking on the Add Form icon in the page editor and choosing the new form you have just created. It is up to you whether you want to show the form Title and Descripton, but I tend to not show these. Publish/update your page with the new form on it.

And your done! You can now fill this form out and a new post will be created instantly.