What is a Submission Form?

SmartSimian Submissions allows you to create forms on your site. Users can fill out the form and submit them, and each submission is saved as content on your site.

Unlike other popular form plugins, Submissions is tightly integrated into your existing content types. When creating a form, you choose which content type each submission gets saved as. The submission becomes a new entry within that content type, and the information the user entered can be saved as custom fields, taxonomies, or connection information.

This makes SmartSimian Submissions very powerful, but what it means in practical terms is that you probably have to plan a little bit before creating a form. For example, using another form plugin, to create a basic Contact Form your workflow might look like this:

  1. Create a form with the plugin's form builder.
  2. Add the form to your site via a shortcode or widget.
  3. Each submitted entry gets put into a big "Form Entries" section in your dashboard.

Using SmartSimian Submissions, your workflow might instead look like this:

  1. Create a "Contact Form Submissions" content type and add desired fields (perhaps Name, Subject, Message, and an "Important" checkbox).
  2. Create a new submission form with the fields you want the user to see (Name, Subject, and Message).
  3. Add the form to your site via a shortcode or widget.
  4. Each submission gets added as an entry to "Contact Form Submissions" content type.

Even though this method has an extra step -- you have to have a content type set up first -- it has certain advantages, including:

  • Since submissions are treated as regular content, you can manipulate them in all the ways you're used to: display them on your site, set them as private or as drafts, add or remove fields and taxonomies, and import/export them with the built-in WordPress importer/exporters.
  • The different types of forms on your site will save entries to different content types, instead of putting them all in a single area.
  • Additional fields can be included that users can't see -- in the example above, site administrators could privately log into the dashboard and mark entries as "Important" (or not).

SmartSimian Submissions also allows users to edit or delete existing entries, if desired. Using this feature, when users go to the form, they will first see a list of entries that are available for them to edit (according to the permissions you set). Submissions even integrates with SmartSimian Queries here, to customize how these lists of entries are displayed.

Potential uses for Submissions:

  • Contact form
  • Online scholarship application tool
  • User-submitted events
  • User-submitted movie reviews
  • "Request a quote" form
  • "Request for information" form
  • "Schedule a meeting" form
  • User-editable databases