Publishing and Reviewing Stories

Matt Medeiros

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Back to: Crowdsource and Share Your Community’s Stories

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To demonstrate the workflow, I’ll walk you through submitting, reviewing, and publishing a story using our setup.

  1. Submitting a Demo Story:
  • I filled out the form with example data:
    • Name: John Doe
    • Title: My New Story
    • Content: “This is my story.”
    • Checked the consent box.
  • Gravity Forms displays a success message upon submission.
  1. Backend Processing:
  • The story is saved in the custom post type Advocate Stories with a status of “Pending Review.”
  • Details such as the title, content, and attribution (“Shared by John Doe”) are automatically populated.
  • The administrator can review the story, make edits for formatting or clarity, and then publish it.

Enhanced Review with Public Post Preview Plugin

Brian:
For situations where you need feedback before publishing, I recommend the Public Post Preview plugin:

  • Purpose: Share a private link to preview the story without publishing it.
  • How It Works:
  • Check a box in the post editor to generate a unique URL.
  • Share this link with team members, directors, or the story submitter for approval.
  • The post remains under “Pending Review” until finalized.

This plugin is invaluable for getting input while maintaining control over what goes live.

Publishing and Leveraging Stories

Brian:
Once a story is approved:

  1. Publish the Story:
  • Click “Publish” to make it live.
  • It will automatically appear on your site’s story archive page.
  1. Engage with Your Community:
  • Turn on comments to encourage interaction.
  • Share the story on social media and newsletters.
  • Repurpose the content for other areas of your site.

Benefits of Advanced Post Creation

This system streamlines the process of collecting, reviewing, and publishing community stories. It encourages:

  • Community Engagement: A platform for users to share their voices.
  • Content Amplification: Stories can be repurposed across multiple channels.
  • Streamlined Workflow: Automates submission handling and minimizes manual effort.

With this setup, you empower your community while building rich, engaging content for your nonprofit’s website. If you have any questions or need further guidance, feel free to reach out!

Publishing and Reviewing Stories

Brian: And now let’s go back to the front end of our site and we’re just going to share a demo story from John Doe. We’re just going to put in an example email address.

Um, we’re going to add a title for our story. My new story. Uh, we’ll skip the image today. And then for this. We’ll just put in an example sentence just to test this out. This is my story. And that would be some paragraphs of text. And we want to make sure that this consent field is required, that they do give us permission.

And I would also recommend Gravity forms does come with a captcha. So you, one of those, you know, I am not a robot check boxes, something like that, or turning on some sort of spam integration, definitely, uh, useful for every form. And then we’re going to submit it and we get that, [00:01:00] uh, success message that we had.

And then let’s go into the back end of the site and see where, what happens to that form. So I’m going to go over to my advocate stories, custom post type over here. And you can see here that I have a new story right here that is pending called my new story, which we just submitted. So it shows up in all the stories.

It’s already here. You don’t have to copy and paste it and deal with any of that. It’s already here in this nice custom post type. And then. You can see their story and you can see that line that we added with who the story was shared by. So here’s my story. This is who it was shared by. And right now, if I head over to the sidebar, it’s set as pending review.

It has not been published yet, so you can edit it. You can make some changes. You can, you know, clean. Sometimes there’s some formatting or typos that you want to clean up or some of the paragraphs or something like that. So you have the option to do that, do this. Cleanup. And then when you’re ready, you’ll click publish.

It’s going to be on the front end of your site. It’s really that easy. Now there was that one additional plugin that I said I would install. So I’m just going to show [00:02:00] you that is this one called. Uh, enable public preview. This is one of my favorite plugins. Let’s say that you. Got some stories from some users.

They’re ready on your site, but you don’t want to publish them yet. Cause you want to show the rest of your team. You want to show maybe, uh, the director of the foundation or something like that. Cause you want to get some permission first, but you don’t want to publish it on their site, but they also don’t really log into the WordPress website.

It’s not their, their job. So. This checkbox, what it does is it gives you a little URL. That’s basically a private URL. You just press the copy button and you can share this with anybody. And with that special link, they’ll be able to see a demo of the story before it’s live on the site. Um, so you don’t have to publish it.

You can keep it still under pending review. But But anybody at your team or even the person who wrote the story themselves, if you want to get their final review, you can give them this public preview link, a super handy free plugin in WordPress. Um, and then once you’re happy with it, you can just [00:03:00] publish it.

Let’s publish it here. It’ll be live on the site. And on your stories page, you’ll see it added automatically to the front end of your site. So there’s so much value in this. Um, this is really just scratching the surface of what you can do with this advanced post creation. But, um, essentially think of ways that you can take your community.

You can get them to share their stories with you. You can get them to get more engaged in the process. And then once you have a story, you can start using it across social media. It gives you something to share, something to put in the newsletter. Something to pull from for the rest of your site. And hopefully you even turn on some comments and you can get more of that community feel from it.

Um, and so that’s a quick demo of advanced post creation. And I just want to thank you. If you have any questions, uh, we’ll definitely take some questions after this and you’ve seen online where you can get access to me to get more information about, you know, things you can do. With gravity forms for your nonprofit website.