Question for you experienced WordPress users

  • I have recently been asked to be the volunteer Boy Scout Eagle chair for our Boy Scout District. The current chair resigned I am guessing because the job is so overwhelming. What happens is that the boy scouts in our district all bring their Eagle project paperwork to him to approve. This approval process is involved and requires communicating by email and in person with an approval committee, with the scout, and ultimately with the council.

    I would like to make this process less time consuming and more automated. Since the application form the scout submits is online anyway, I would like to set up a website so that instead of him just emailing it to me and then me emailing it to the committee, he could instead enter his submission into a wordpress submission form online, attach his application, and then have that automatically email the approval committee members. I would also like the committee members to be able to be able to review the paperwork from the website, click on an approval button? and have this somehow connected visually to the scouts name and submission so the scout would be able to go online and be able to see when his project is approved. Also after all committee members have approved the project, the scout would automatically receive an email letting him know and prompting him with the next step in the process. Also it would be awesome if I could have some kind of automatic tracker showing the list of submissions and where each of them were in the signup process.

    So my questions

    What is the best multi featured submission form widget available to help with this?
    Are there any other widgets that would help me facilitate this approval process?
    Any other ideas?

    Thank you so much. I don’ t have much time and unless I come up with a better process than is in place now, I’m going to be hating life ?? Any info you can give me would be appreciated.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • This is far too complex a topic to be covered in this forum.

    [ Link moderated: Please use these forums for support. Email or soliciting support is not allowed on these forums. ]

    Your not going to find an out of the box solution. What you want to do is very possible but would require an advanced contact form plugin along with some custom code.

    Gravity Forms ( paid $39 ). Can do everything your requiring except mark as approved but it does have hooks that a developer could use to implement the solution.

    You will probably need to hire a developer. You can use WP Jobs to list your request ( the site is down right now but should be back up soon)
    https://jobs.wordpress.net/

    I am offering free support for a topic that cannot be adequately covered in this forum. I have done this many times in the past and never been ‘moderated’. My site is https://wordpress.mcdspot.com

    Your help is greatly appreciated. The reason email support is not allowed is because it’s not a good way to help out a lot of people. The best place to go is the support forums, where a number of people might be able to help with the problem and others can learn from it.

    If you have a solution to the problem please add it here as it will be greatly appreciated by all.

    I recently did something similar for my son’s Cub Scouts troop. it doesn’t have as much of an “approval process” as yours does (but you’re handling the entire district, so there’s a lot more to do there).

    I used a combination of Gravity Forms (with the PayPal and User Registration add-ons), Theme My Login (because it not only make the login and profile pages “pretty”, but it’ll also add in a “pending” status for new subscribers who haven’t been approved, which you can use in gravity forms), and Events Manager. Using “Is_user_logged_in()” and “current_user_can()” helped keep several sections private (requiring login to access those areas).

    They went from a mess to simply using the site for everything, and really enjoy the ease of keeping things all in one spot. I *was* using a plugin calle d”User Messages” for “internal messaging”, but something’s up with it and it’s no longer working. I’m looking into just using BuddyPress instead, as it seems it’ll have all that “internal functionality” – including messaging – that they’re looking for.

    VTX is right – this is something that really can’t be covered over in the forums – it’s quite a complex project that will requie a lot of coding. But i can be done (as I’ve done it, albeit on a smaller scale. However, they are hoping that the work I did will finally convince the other scouts in the district to combine in one spot and use the domain name they bought for just that purpose. So it’s definitely scalable.) Hopefully that gave you a place to start!

    @jana1, I really would like to discuss this to find out exactly what you need. Please contact me at my site as given above.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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