In admin panel, use a form to create a post?

Question

I'm unfortunately working with rather thick headed clients who insist they need a "form" to fill out instead of the normal WP WYSIWYG Post editor. I tried to tell them that they could hide the parts that were confusing them, but apparently that won't work. Is there any way to create a simple 4 line form, in the admin panel, that creates a post with the content from those 4 lines? Any existing plugins I could use to do this?

I've already tried a custom post type but the "large box" for adding content is apparently too hard to grasp because they keep wanting "lines" in a form.

I just need the output to be consistent. A simple post, something like:

Item: whatever they type

Amount: whatever they type

Model: whatever they type

Description: whatever they type

They can't handle writing the word "Item" themselves, and want a form to do it. Essentially, that's what I'm dealing with.

Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

You could create a custom metabox with those items as custom fields and then either remove support for the editor or hide it with CSS. Then output the post meta instead on the front end. Be aware that if you remove support for the editor, you'll have funky behavior with media attachments.

Edit: If you need a plugin to do the metabox, I'd actually recommend Advanced Custom Fields, at least at the moment: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/

Answer 2

Another option would be to use Gravity Forms to create the post. They wouldn't even need to see the dashboard that way. You could make the page password protected or restricted to a user role to keep out spammers.

See Post Creation (mid-way down left column): http://www.gravityforms.com/features/wordpress-integration/

This add-on plug might help too: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gravity-forms-custom-post-types/

Answer 3

as Helen mentioned, removing the post editor:

add_action('init', 'wpse27391_post_remove_editor');
function wpse27391_post_remove_editor() {
    remove_post_type_support( 'post', 'editor' );
}

an easy class for creating meta boxes: WPAlchemy MetaBox.

• edit by Jon Brown - This is the MetaBox class I use https://github.com/jaredatch/Custom-Metaboxes-and-Fields-for-WordPress Also note that a metabox class is coming to core in 3.3 http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/18179

or maybe custom field template plugin.