With the cheerful assistance of Pie Man, I have been able to create an effective SAEF web form that feeds into a weblog. I can access and edit it through the Control Panel, but would like to be able to edit it through a webform as well.

I would like to be able to change the author to one of the multi-author list names, change the status (open, closed, etc) and perhaps add more content by way of custom fields. I am open to suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

Forrest

First,

You’ll obviously need to download a copy of FormHelper
Secondly, build a new template where you will link to from entries in another template.

You’ll find full documentation on how to do this in the FormHelper plugin, but I’ll provide a basic template below.

As you can see, FormHelper makes it a little easier whereas you can specify the “short_name” of the field…
I’ve also set my Categories to show as hidden… you can populate them as a dropdown like this:

The key thing is to have a Weblog Entries loop wrapped around the form and have the form linked to dynamically so that the data is populated.
You can easily make links to the Edit form by putting code like this on your frotn end templates (within the weblog:entries loop):

The code above allows for both Group ID #1 and #6 to see a link that will set itself to the Edit Form

Ahoy!

Hi. I just had a breakthrough and a glitch all in one move.

The last entry in the form is a text box with details about the entry. I tried to list this as textarea with rows and cols but nothing was showing up in the text area. I changed it to input=“text” and it now has data in it, but also is only one line and not too easy to edit.

The edit form is showing up properly when I click on the Edit Entry link, however, when I make a change and click submit I get the following error:

Invalid GET Data - Array

How do I enlarge the text area for the text box and what might be happening on the submit that would cause the error?

Thanks,

Forrest

Forrest,

You’ll need to make textareas formatted like this:

Pie Man,

Well done on the text area. I just need to strip out the formatting and it will look good.

thanks,

Forrest

Pie Man,

Can you please clarify why you need all those hidden fields?  What is their purpose in the code?  I don’t have much background in forms, so I sense there is a fundamental concept here I am missing.

Craig Uffman - 14 January 2009 09:09 AM

Can you please clarify why you need all those hidden fields?  What is their purpose in the code?

Certainly

There are two types there… well 3, sort of

1. Every custom field requires it’s Formatting type to be listed as well, otherwise EE takes a guess and messing things up
Example:

2. a) Some of the fields I’ve chosen to hide because (in my typically scenarios anyway) I do not want those fields to be editable by the member that will be editting the content. Or, sometimes that data stays the same no matter what, so it’s less clutter on the page when you hide it.
Example:

2. b) Some of the fields are required to be in the form. If you leave them out the data for them will be lost:
Example:

Even though the Category for my scenario will/should NEVER change, I still have to specify it, or EE will lose that data.

Though I’ve never tested it, I’m sure close to half of my fields I have hidden in the example don’t even need to be there, but the intention is keeping the data from being lost. I haven’t tested it, but I’m sure if you left out ones like these, the data for those values would not be lost or change:

Ah.  I get it. Thanks!

I copied your example and adjusted it for my weblog fields.  But I am getting the following error condition:

Link to the Channel
http://www.mylinktochannel

” id=“form_channel_link” maxlength=“150” >

I have attached an image of what is happening so you can see it on the edit form.  Notice that this does not happen on other fields with the same syntax and of the same field type (text input).

Here’s the code I am using.

  Can you tell me what I am doing wrong?

I am guessing that the problem is that the field in question is formatted as xhtml, and did not declare that.  Will check.

Hey Craig,

The code you’ve provided appears to be for the title… would I be able to see ALL the code (at least in that surrounding area)?

And what is the exact output of one of these “Link to the Channel” fields supposed to output?

Sure.  Here it is.

The output of the field should be the text string for a url.  We are storing the url in the channel_link field, so that what renders when the field is displayed on a form is a hyperlink to the channel.

Pie Man,
Can you clarify what is supposed to go in the permalink path field to the edit form?

Never mind.  I found I had a stray bracket causing the problem.

I notice that the problem seems to be connected with the fact that this is a custom field for which the data consists of url’s and for which the formatting option is set to xhtml.  It seems to choke on that field, but the next field is one for which I copied that same code and simply changed the field names.  And it works fine.

Pie Man,
I am attaching another screen shot that I think makes the problem more visible.  I think it has something to do with the parsing of urls.  Perhaps there is code in your parser to handle this?  In the database, there is simply the text string of the url.  But the field coming back has the anchor syntax, and part of that seems to be put into the input, and then part of that seems to flow out of the input and act like a label.

In the example in the image, the database has “http://covenant-communion.com”.  Using the code that I sent above, EE seems to surround that value with the html tag, and that flows out of the input box.

Any ideas?

Hey Craig,

What does the actual parsed source code look like for that area?

What happens if you add the field_parser to that field?