Editing posts

After a post is created via a form, the post would be shown on a site just like a post you create manually. You should also see it under “Posts” in WP admin where you can edit it.

It shows up, but again, only displays the shortcode in the WP admin… and going back to that post on the front-end shows nothing.

I’m totally confused whether you are talking about a post with the form or some shortcode or the post created by the form.

No worries, I understand. Took me a while to figure it out myself, so here goes.

The page shows the form just fine: https://imgur.com/ueFykh4

The form submits and becomes a post: https://imgur.com/GByRsil

The post appears in the admin: https://imgur.com/hoeK0GP

But the post itself does not show what I typed in: https://imgur.com/JfAwXtS

Instead it shows the shortcode I put in the page to get the contact form to show: https://imgur.com/r1oxL5z

That helps. Weird that the short code is there.

Would you paste in here your form definition? (Please format as code)

[hidden post_title]
[hidden post_content "application"]
[hidden post_category_name "Duct Seal"]
[hidden ID]

<p>Equipment Make*
[text* text-227 id:make]</p>
<p>Start-up Date*
[text* text-8 id:startupdate]</p>
<p>Model #*
[text* text-246 id:condensermodelnumber]</p>

<p>[submit "Send"]</p>

Here are the modifications I did to FormToPost_Plugin.php

$post = array(
#            'post_status' => 'publish',
            'post_status' => 'pending',                              # initial rebate application status
            'post_type' => 'post',
            'post_category' => array(0)
        );

And here are the modifications I did to the hidden.php of Contact Form Module

global $post;
	date_default_timezone_set(get_option('timezone_string'));				# sets the timezone used from the wordpress selection
	$rebate_time = date("m/d/Y @ h:ia");													# rebate application timestamp
	$rebate_type = get_the_title();
	if(is_object($post)) {

		switch($sanitized_name) {
			case 'post_title':
			case 'post-title':
				#$value = $post->post_title;
				$value = $rebate_type." submitted on " .$rebate_time;                        # rebate application title
				break;

Ok, I was a little confused, but I now understand that https://imgur.com/r1oxL5z is the view of the page with the form, not the post listed in https://imgur.com/hoeK0GP

I assume if you open https://imgur.com/hoeK0GP then you see an empty post. This is because there is nothing in the post_content field. Whatever is in post_content in the form becomes the content of the post.

If you want to get the other form values (make, startdate, etc.) then you need to find a way of copying that information into the post_content field. You can try to do this (1) on the front end using some Javascript prior to submit or (2) register a hook in CF7 or (3) modify FormToPost_Plugin.php to do it. I would recommend (2).

In fact I think you can avoid changing code in hidden.php and my plugin by using a CF7 hook instead. If you modify a plugin, then you loose your changes if you update the plugin. Using a hook is a better way to go.

I’ll suggest my own Add Actions and Filters plugin which gives you an admin page to place PHP code in. Then I would put code like this leveraging CF7’s wpcf7_posted_data hook (I haven’t tested it! Just giving you an idea).

function set_form_to_post_values($posted_data) {
    $posted_data['post_status'] = 'pending';

    $posted_data['post_content'] = 'Make:' . $posted_data['text-227] . '<br/>Start Update:' . $posted_data['text-8'] . '<br/>Model:' . $posted_data['text-246'];

    date_default_timezone_set(get_option('timezone_string'));
    $rebate_time = date("m/d/Y @ h:ia");
    // Actually get_the_title() won't work here in the hook callback functions...
    // ... might try adding javascript to page to set the value of a hidden field
    // which could be accessed here.
    // see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18023030/how-to-get-post-title-by-javascript-before-submission
    $rebate_type = 'TBD'; //get_the_title();
    $posted_data['post_title'] = $rebate_type." submitted on " .$rebate_time; 

    return $posted_data;
}

add_action('wpcf7_posted_data', 'set_form_to_post_values');

Thank you so much! Your Add Actions and Filters plugin ROCKS, by the way!