position: relative;

My client who rents pop-up campers needed a simple, easy-to-manage guestbook for his redesigned website. He had a clunky script on his old site that he said had been nothing but a source of spam for years – could I do something better? Of course I could.

I looked into the available plugins; there were only a couple that were compatible with the current version of WordPress, and when I tried them I found they were not going to work, mainly because I couldn’t easily add the extra custom form fields I needed.

So I decided to make my own.  In WordPress I created a page called Guestbook. I used the TDO Mini Forms plugin to create my input form. It was easy to configure for moderation by my client and for Akismet spam protection.

Making the Input Form

I set the form to create a new post for each submission, submit it to the ‘guestbook’ category, then built a custom form. I used two custom field widgets (TDO Mini Forms widgets) for Name and Hometown, a content widget for the post name and comments, and then a simple one-question captcha. All of these widgets are drag-and-drop (there are many others available, including image uploader) and very customizable.

Once the form’s built, it can be hacked to rearrange fields, modify CSS, etc. You can also export a final copy of your form to a text file to later be imported for reuse on other projects.

Getting the Form Into the Page

I created a custom category template page where I limited the category to be displayed to ‘guestbook’ by using the ‘include’ parameter for wp_list_categories, set to category 10 (my guestbook posts) like this:

 __( 'RSS', 'hybrid' ), 'show_count' => true, 'use_desc_for_title' => false, 'title_li' => false, 'include' => 10) ); ?>

Then in WordPress I set my Guestbook page to use that new custom category template.

I used the TDO Mini Form widget to put the form into the sidebar on my Guestbook page. Nothing to do here really except restrict where it displays with Widget Logic:

is_category('guestbook')

Styling the Form

Custom styling of the form is easy, the file is /plugins/tdo-mini-forms/tdomf-style_form.css. I only made a couple of small changes, mostly redoing the ‘submit’ button to match the others on the site.

Styling the Page and Guestbook Posts

I added some text at the top of the page by putting it into the Description field for the category. Then I wanted to style each blog post with a border and some additional changes in presentation.

The CSS was simple – I made the posts narrower, put a larger margin underneath them, added padding, added a subtle background color and border, and made the headlines a little smaller and with a different font than the page headline:

div.category-guestbook {
margin: 10px auto 20px;
padding: 14px;
width: 90%;
background-color: #e4f1dc;
border: 1px solid #bec19c;
}
div.category-guestbook h2.entry-title {
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 20px;
font-family: Arial, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

Using Filter Hooks to Control What’s Displayed for each Post

I’m using Theme Hybrid, so this part was a little easier than it might normally be. Here’s a good overview of filter hooks and how to use them, and this is what’s built into Theme Hybrid. And, here’s a hooks database so you can see all the filter and action hooks available in WP 3.0.

What I wanted to do:

• Remove the link from the post title
• Change the byline to show only the publish date
• Show all of the post content instead of an excerpt

I found that I can do all of this with hooks in my theme’s functions.php file.

/* Remove the link in the entry title on the guestbook posts */
add_filter ( 'hybrid_entry_title', 'guestbook_entry_title' );
function guestbook_entry_title( $title ) {
global $post;
if ( is_category('10') )
$title = the_title( '
', '

', false );
return $title;
}

/* Alter the guestbook byline */
add_filter( 'hybrid_byline', 'guestbook_byline' );
function guestbook_byline( $byline ) {
global $post;
if( is_category('10') )
$byline = '

[entry-published]

';
return $byline;
}

/* Display full post content for guestbook category page */
add_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'guestbook_cat_content' );
function guestbook_cat_content( $content ) {
global $post;
if ( is_category('10') ) {
$content = get_post_field( 'post_content', $post->ID );
$content = apply_filters( 'the_content', $content );
}
return $content;
}

Here’s the final product in action.

That’s pretty much it – now when someone submits a comment (that isn’t flagged as spam by Akismet) my client gets an email notification. He logs into WordPress and goes to TDO Mini Form’s moderation panel, and can then edit, trash or publish the post as he likes. A simple, solid solution that took less time than anticipated (which is always nice!).