Help me make the submission module for a website.

May 13, 2009 4:58 PM

I want to make a website with a submission module. I've looked around and it would be very similar to http://www.textsfromlastnight.com/. Does anyone know how their submission process works?
posted by jjbb to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Unless I'm missing something, all you would need is a very basic, standard, submit form. A contact submission form like you see on every other website would work with simple modifications if you wanted to personalize the information. For something with a little more meat, check out the awesome capabilities at drop.io and their "hidden submission" system. You can easily have people upload text, photos, whatever to your site using drop.io. http://drop.io/hiddenaccess

They have so many features now at drop.io it's scary. Excellent site.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 5:37 PM on May 13 [1 favorite has favorites]

Without knowing how the TFLN site works, what I think I want to do is have a submission form that submits the text to a secure page. From that page a group of administrators could approve the text and have it automatically added to the site. Is this possible with drop.io?
posted by jjbb at 5:42 PM on May 13

Well, now it sounds more like you're maybe just wanting what amounts to blog comments moderated before they're live - except maybe the "comments" be actual "posts" rather than "comments." Is that right? I'm a tad confused about what you're really wanting to do.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 6:38 PM on May 13

What are you making this website in? This sounds like a simple enough form/script to put together depending on your web competence [thats if you're coding this yourself... if you were looking for a module that works with wordpress or somesuch then ignore this post]


Anyway quick thought brings up a simple setup like this:
- submission page with a form.
- server-side script to handle the form and dump it in the db [flagged as "unprocessed"]
- administrator page with a list of unprocessed submissions pulled from the db and an "approve"/"reject" button by each one. [access to this page is limited to admin-level users only obviously]
- server-side script to update the status in the db for the submission.
- main page that grabs all the submissions from the db which are marked as "approved" and displays them.
posted by xqwzts at 3:02 AM on May 14

There are probably some open source bash.org clones (of which textsfromlastnight looks like one).
posted by MesoFilter at 10:19 PM on May 14