Jul 7 2012

#BloggerTip: Using GravityForms to automate formatting of blog posts

By Jane • BloggerTips • • Tags:

gravity form iconIf you couldn’t tell by the last couple of weeks’ posts about Automator and Belvedere, I am a big fan of automating repetitive tasks in my life. This way I can spend more time creating content, reading or just laying about the house. I’ve been telling everyone how much I enjoyed Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit” ( A | BN | K | S ) because the book is essentially Automator for your life. (Seriously, this is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in years. I guess I’ll have to do a proper review of it. For bloggers who went to BEA, this was in your Random House Power Reader swag bag. Yellow cover. Red circles. Stick figures).

Gravity Forms, a paid plugin, is essentially automator for blog posts. In almost every blog post there is a repetitive task that is time consuming and tedious. What if you could create a form that would generate all that formatting automatically?

For reviews, for example, every post has this format:

Dear {Author’s Last Name}:

Blah blah blah

{Cover Image Left Align} more bla bla

Valediction

{Buy Links}

For debut author questionnaires, authors are asked a number of questions. The questions are bolded and the answers are not. How tedious, right?  Not with gravity forms.

For both reviews and for questionnaires and almost every blog post that is created, I use a gravity form.  The form then feeds the inputted information into the body of the post and creates a draft for editing. Take a look at the debut author questionnaire form here.  The form asks for things like the author’s name, book title, year of release, website along with images for the blog post as well as all the standard questions in the interview.

Now look at the back end.  (Click for the entire image)   Each question is either a single text line or a paragraph text. No magic here.  The magic ensues when you use the Post Fields.  The Post Fields match the post fields in wordpress.

Gravity Forms Post Fields

 

None of these fields contain content that I’ve created.  Instead it is based on a text entry made by the person filling out the form.  For example, title is based on the {book name} by {author name}.

Gravity Forms Title Example

The post body is this:

I’ve had some concerns by readers who are primarily print readers that the coverage at Dear Author has been too focused on ebooks. When I asked the readers what they were interested in seeing, they responded that they would like to know more about print debut authors. We developed a little questionnaire and every Wednesday at 10:00 AM CST (as long as we have content) we’ll post the questionnaire answers along with links to the author’s site and a buy link to her book. I hope this helps people discovery new books. Now, on to the answers.

{Upload a high resolution image of your book:18:medium:center}

<strong>Name of debut release:</strong> {Name of debut release:1}

<strong>Release date:</strong> {Release date::2}

<strong>Publisher:</strong> {Publisher::3}

<strong>2 sentence summary:</strong> {2 sentence summary::4}

<strong>Genre:</strong> {Genre::5}

<strong>Characters:</strong> {Characters::6}

<strong>What makes this story different:</strong> {What makes this story different::7}

<strong>Is this a series?:</strong> {Name of the Series:9}

<strong>Why you wrote this book:</strong> {Why you wrote this book::10}

<strong>Why is this your first published book? How many did you write before?</strong> {Why is this your first published book? How many did you write before?:11}

<strong>What’s your writing process?</strong> {What’s your writing process?:12}

<strong>Your next published book.</strong> {Your next published book.:13}

<strong>The last book you read that you loved.</strong> {The last book you read that you loved.:15}

<strong>The last book you read for research.</strong> {The last book you read for research.:16}

<strong>The romance book character you most identify with.</strong> {The romance book character you most identify with.:17}

{Author Image:19:medium:center}

You can check out more about {Author Name:23} and her books at <a href=”{Website:27}”>{Website:27}</a>

<p style=”text-align:center”>AmazonBNSonyKobo]</p>

Thus these debut author questionnaires are built by the inputs of the individuals filling out the form. I even have the images correctly placed and correctly sized in the post body so I don’t need to go back and do that later.

Look at this line here:

You can check out more about {Author Name:23} and her books at <a href=”{Website:27}”>{Website:27}</a>

 As you can see, you can really harness the power of Gravity Forms to create nearly any type of  blog post.  Let’s look at the Review Form.  There are a few things I am doing here.  The Author’s Name is being used several times. First in the title:
REVIEW:  {Book Title:4} by {Author Name:12}
And then in the custom taxonomy (or custom tag) “Book Authors”:
Book Author Gravity Form
Finally, in the buy links:

As you can see, I already have the short code button styling there as well.  The image has already been set to be a “featured image” and I’ve coded in what size of image I want (medium) and where I want it (left aligned).  The book title, like the author name, is reused several places as well. When it is time to publish the review, it’s a quick check to see that everything is in place and then “publish.”

The biggest drawback for Gravity Forms is that the paid support you supposedly get is kind of non existent. I posted a question on the forums and it was never answered. I’ve read a few other complaints about the slowness of the Gravity Form support system so don’t expect to get a great customer service experience when you buy the plugin.  However, I think the plugin itself is amazing and a huge time saver for me.

Why do I share this information? Because I like to think that the blogging community is about sharing great ideas. The content of Dear Author determines whether people want to visit, not what tools I use to make it easier to blog. However, if you use Gravity Forms, you can use my affiliate link.

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