Auto-Add Customers’ Stories to the WordPress Database

Your Gift Certificate (YGC) of Southborough, MA requested that recipients of their housewarming gift box be able to tell the story of how valuable the offers and coupons enclosed in the gift box were to them as recent home buyers.

Requirements included:

• Allow unregistered users to easily enter their stories and submit them for publication
• Do not allow the story to be public without YGC’s approval
• Notify YGC when there is a new story to publish
• Ready the story for publishing so that all that YGC needs to do is hit the Publish button
• Thank the homebuyers for entering their stories

Solution:

• YGC had a WordPress website
• Create a custom PHP form with the fields required by YGC
• Do field validation with JavaScript
• When the form is submitted, the homebuyer sees a Thank You screen. Behind the scenes,
  • the data is tested in PHP
  • the homebuyer is added as “contributor” in the WordPress back end
  • the post is added to the other blog posts
  • an email is sent to YGC notifying them that there is a new story to Publish

(Authors designated as “contributor” in WordPress cannot publish posts. Contributors can enter draft posts. Only WordPress users designated as editors and admins can publish the work of a contributor. )

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