Data Entry Page
I have a client that is a local church and we do all of their video and design work. Every week we do their bulletin layout. Right now they email me all the content that is going in it. It’s a sloppy method and usually they give me too much in one area and not enough in another. I want to streamline the input process with a page where they can go and input all the details and submit it to me, and it has rules and parameters that they have to follow.
The bulletin would be broken down into segments and in those segments, there would be a character limit. So for now let’s just say there is room for 10 segments of information in the bulletin and each can have up to 100 characters in it. I would want a form that allows them to click a drop down menu and select from a list the category of that segment, then a calendar pop up selection for optional start and end dates, then a title, then finally the body of the segment which would have the character limit.
Using cForms and one other plugin in WordPress I was able to create most of that. I had trouble with the character limit part and some of the global settings. Mostly I couldn’t figure out how to customize the look of that one page and how to put it in a specific locaiton, like /church or something like that. So all of this made me realize I’m not a programmer so I should just stop messing with it!
So here are a few things that might be tricky. In each of the 10 segments I would want to make the category and title required fields. However, they aren’t required to fill up the bulletin with all 10 segments. So maybe a selection at the top of each seciton that lets them ignore this segment so that when they submit it they won’t get a message about the required fields they didn’t fill out. Also the character limit thing seemed really weird in cForms because it’s sort of a workaround that only gives you an error at the end and it felt clunky. What I would really like is a character countdown feature so they can see in real time that they are getting close to going over.
All of this info can then just be sent in an email to me so I can copy it into the bulletin.
I don’t even know if WordPress is the right product for this, so please tell me if you think something else would work. I’ll supply all the design elements for whatever setup you end up using. Just tell me what the parameters are.