January 28, 2010 
I recently stumbled across this useful plugin that offers a widget for quick sidebar posting. The Sidebar Posting plugin works with WordPress and WPMU and has lot of potential to enhance content contribution on your social network when used with BuddyPress. It is very similar to the BuddyPress Quickpress plugin. Quickpress is quite a bit better-looking out of the box, but it has the drawback of being located in a sub-menu.
The Sidebar Posting plugin is different in that it resides in the sidebar of the page and submits posts to the main blog for approval before publication. The user also has the option to select a category from a drop down menu. You can see how this might come in handy for a site that is always soliciting user submitted content without requiring users to have their own blog. It saves you the trouble of having to aggregate content from multiple blogs if your site is not intended for long-form blogging. This form is only available to logged-in users. A visitor will see a button that says “Login to Post.” This helps in reducing spam posts sent to your account as drafts. The screenshot you see to your left is a quick cleaned up version of the plugin. Here’s how to use it:
1. Install the Sidebar Posting Plugin.
2. Add the Widget to Your Sidebar or Widgetized Area.
Appearance >> Widgets >> New Post. Alternatively, you can put it directly in your theme’s template by using the template tag: sidebar_post_widget()
3. Customize the Widget.
As much as I love this widget, it has the most unfortunate-looking design out of the box and presently comes with no customization options. You will need to use Firebug to grab its CSS and style it up so that it will be irresistible to your users for content submission. An attractive interface is one of the most important keys to increasing user-generated content. If it’s ugly, people don’t want to use it, no matter how well it functions. Though many of you may be proudly utilitarian when it comes to GUI, the majority of your users are not, especially the younger demographic. Your user has a natural appetite for beauty and it directly affects his affiliation with your site, as well as his participation level. So if you decide to employ this widget, don’t forget to make it pretty.
You can use this for a lightning fast way to collect testimonials, news tips, project updates, scavenger hunts, or any other category of content that would lend itself to short posts. It allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of your community and easily filter and display the content they are producing, without requiring them to have their own blogs to participate. Because you have the ability to tag them or re-categorize them, you can assign all the user submissions the same tag or category upon approval and call them in your template with a custom loop. Imagine only having to click “Publish” to post to your testimonials page. There’s no need to write a manual for how to post when you include it this way.
If someone wanted to extend this plugin, my suggestions for some excellent features are auto-notification upon publication of the post, extra customizable input field options, and image upload. The most important addition would be for the post to also display which user submitted the content, along with his avatar and a link to his profile, if using BuddyPress. I can confirm that it works perfectly with WordPress 2.9.1 and BuddyPress 1.2.
Sarah Gooding on Google+
You should also check out my plugin TDO Mini Forms which does the same but more and it’s older. I’m afraid I haven’t tested it on wpmu.org,but several users have with varying success. It does user posting, from a widget/sidebar, themed page or from a page with in the WordPress menus, supports image uploads and even does post editing. And there is an advanced “hacker” option to really take control of the presentation of the form (or forms).
@Mark
I’m already using your plugin and I absolutely love it.. It’s a crucial feature for many of my sites, and I’ll send you a donation right now (forgot about that). Amazing plugin :-)
I’m having a bit of a hard time styling this – don’t know why!
I notice that there is a css folder in the plugin – what do i have to do to get it to use any stylesheets i put in there?
plus the options menu doesn’t work – just gives out an internal server erroor unfortunately
Great idea thought and I’ll definitely make good use of it
It needs a little work but it’s definitely a really useful plugin so that people don’t have to go through the dashboard to post. If you have Firebug you can target the selectors it uses or wrap it in your own ID, etc.
Thanks Sarah
I did try all my usual stuff but perhaps I’m just being stupid because it’s getting late!
What do I need to add to my sidebar.php to manually call the widget and I’ll try it that way
You’re right it does need a lot of work – why it was styled like that in the first place, I’m not so sure!!
Wrap this in PHP tags to put it in there manually: sidebar_post_widget()
thank you!
Decided to buy Gravity Forms instead of using TDO MiniForms for a slightly different usage, but it has the same capability.
What I hope this can do is allow a group-specific post editable by the group admin. Of course, I need to first create a group extension that provides somewhere to show the posts and automagically assign posts to just that group.
I’m also a bit worried about the size of my posts table, but oh well.
Another very helpful post, Sarah!
Thanks
I am glad to read some of you who use my sidebar-post plugin. I am working on the next version which should come with a lot more options and styling made easy. A few days from now all should be ready to download. The feed is at http://www.wprooms.com/feed
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