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Edit pages/entries outside Control Panel

Trying to gauge whether this is at all possible:

Has anyone set up a form before which allows for the publishing or editing of pages/entries outside of the Control Panel?

Something similar to Expression Engine’s Channel Form or Craft‘s Entry Form.

Katrin Kerber

Katrin Kerber 0 points

  • 7 years ago
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

What's the use case for that?

I'd like to set up pages/events where a maximum amount of people can add their details via a form. I'd like this to be saved within the entry, as a repeater I would imagine, so that I can display their details within the page/event and set a maximum limit as well.

Hope that makes sense...

Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

What sort of practical application does that have? (Just trying to understand the requirement)

Okay, quick run-down of my current train of thought:

I want to set up events people can attend. For each event, there will be a form where people can add their name and details to say to are coming to that event. Once they have submitted that form, their details will appear on that event page. There will be a space limit, so once a certain amount of people have added their name, I want to hide the form and mark the event as 'full'.

I know I could use something like Eventbrite instead, but I rather wouldn't :)

Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

I think if we were to add that sort of thing, it would be a feature of the Forms app - to list responses. This doesn't sound like site content, so adding it to a region wouldn't really make sense in a Perch context.

I think having an 'Attendee' section which is a repeater region within an event does make sense as content - particularly if that section is shown on the event‘s detail page.

Your suggestion could work, too, but might be a bit more cumbersome if you have to create a form additionally for every event and I don't know how displaying that info for every event would work out.

Also be interested to know if somebody else has custom-coded something along those lines before, maybe with some PHP wizardry or somesuch...

Katrin's query sounds very similar to a project I am just starting to try to figure our for our church web site.

The pastor wants me to create a secure subdomain that would contain a log, in table form, of pastoral-care events. It would include: Date; person visited; type of visit radio buttons; description. Multiple people need to be able to log into this subdomain, view the table of visitation events, and quickly add/delete/edit rows to the table.

I want to make this all happen on the page, as opposed to making each person a Perch user, as this is a really one-off application. Most of the people using this tool will never need to be in Perch for any other reason. Some of them are older and technologically challenged, and the less clicking (such as logging into Perch and navigating to the right page) the better.

I just downloaded the Members app, thinking I can use that to restrict access to the subdomain, and the Forms app to get the data into Perch. I've just started scanning the forum looking to see if there's a way to display Forms app data back onto a page in a repeater.

But Drew, maybe this is pushing the envelope a bit further than it currently goes?

Rachel Andrew

Rachel Andrew 394 points
Perch Support

That's not a feature of any current add-on or of Perch Core.

You could develop such a thing as an add-on to Perch using the API but it isn't on our current list as a first party add-on.

Thanks Rachel. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. By starting from a "how can I do this in Perch" perspective, I overlooked a simpler solution using Google Docs.

Katrin, in case you are interested, the tack I'm now taking is to create a Google Docs form for the data entry and to embed both the form and the resulting Google Docs spreadsheet it creates via iframes.

Kludgy maybe, but this is pro bono work!

I also stumbled across some other solutions that might suit you better: