Intercreate.org

Intercreate.org is an organisation of an international network of people interested in art, science, culture and technology. They regularly publish submissions from artists around the world on their WordPress website. Publishing these submissions was a very labour intensive process, submissions were checked then content missing or outside of the specifications needed to be followed up on. Finally with all ducks in a row the administrator was still left with the task of manually imputing the submission content into a blog post.

So, in a discussion with Ian Clothier, site admin and project manger for Intercreate, we were asked a very good question: “Is there a way to automate this process, within our budget”.

Turns out our answer was most definitely – yes!

Ian was very keen to work with us to design a process where potential users could register as a member of Intercreate.org using a public facing front end web form that saved all their details and content to the WordPress database.

Once a user was approved as a registered member they would be eligible to submit a post for approval, also using a public facing front end web form. When completing the form, users would be compelled to provide information, text content of a certain length and images of a certain specification. If the user is unable to complete the required fields while filling out the form or supply the necessary content, they are unable to submit their post for approval.

So, when Ian receives notification of a submission, he could be confident that all he would need to do is review the posts content to ensure it is appropriate for the site, then publish the post to be a part of Intercreate.org. Because the system puts fairly exacting requirements on the submission, 95% of the work required is already done before Ian is even notified of the submission.

So what was the solution we came up with?

As you are probably aware, one of the main benefits of having a WordPress website is that there are thousands of software plugins written and sold to extend the capabilities of this extensive framework, the problem is,  with most pre-built software there is never just one plugin alone the will solve the issues and do everything required for certain set of tasks.

In this case we used 2 different WordPress plugins, created a custom post type to add custom field data to the database and developed a custom WordPress blog post template to publish the results of approved posts to the public in an aesthetically pleasing way in keeping with the styling of their website  – automatically.

The site admin would receive a notification when a new user registration is submitted, the user receives confirmation their registration is pending and then the user receives a notification when their registration is approved. Notifications are sent in the same fashion when a user submits a post for approval.

So now this system is up and running, on time and within budget, the team at Intercreate.org now spend a fraction of the time on user submitted approvals, the tiring manual process has now been eliminated leaving Ian and the team to focus on what they are best at. Here’s an example of a user created post, Intercreate.org User Submisson Example. Submitted by a registered user, approved by a site admin and published automatically by the WordPress custom development we implemented on the site.

If you you need a custom on-line or software solution to free you of a mundane, repetitive task, then maybe you should give us a call to ask how we can help. We love solving problems, maybe yours could be the next one we solve.