November 18, 2015 archive

Is There A WordPress Plugin That Adds Easy "Sign A Petition" Support?

Petition

Has anyone found a great plugin for WordPress that adds the easy ability for visitors to a site to "sign" a statement or position and have their name appear? If so, could you please share the info?

Here's what's going for me - I operate a site, www.openwsis2015.org, where there are multiple public statements published relating to Internet governance. We are actively seeking more signers/endorsements for both... and my process of adding people to the list of signatories is cumbersome and inefficient.

My Current Inefficient Process

Here's the process I go through when someone signs the recent Joint Statement on WSIS+10:

  1. The person submits the signing form with their info.
  2. I receive an email with the person's information.
  3. I open up the WordPress admin interface and navigate to the TablePress page.
  4. I open up the appropriate table (organizations or individuals) for editing.
  5. I manually copy and paste the info from the email into the TablePress table.
  6. I save the table.
  7. The name now appears on the list of signatories.
The whole copy/paste thing is what kills me.

The Process I Would Like To Have

Here's how I'd like it to go:

  1. The person submits the signing form with their info.
  2. I receive an email telling me there is a new signatory to moderate.
  3. I open up the WordPress admin interface and navigate to the TablePress page.
  4. I click a link in the email that brings me to the appropriate tab in the WordPress admin interface.
  5. I click on an "Approve" link in that admin window.
  6. The name now appears on the list of signatories.

Essentially what I'm looking for is something like the regular moderate Comments interface... only when I approve the submission it shows up in a table instead of as a comment to the page or post.

And I want it to be customizable in terms of what fields I use. These particular statements have the fields they do, but for the next time I do this I may want different fields.

My Search So Far

I searched through the WordPress plugin directory using the keyword "petition" but most of the plugins I found use external services.

I don't want that. I want a petition/statement page running on my own site without any dependencies on external services.

The YAWPP (Yet Another WordPress Petition) plugin looks interesting... but I'm concerned that it hasn't been updated in 2 years. That's a long time in the world of WordPress... and support requests don't seem to be being answered.

I've tried other search terms and I've done some brief searching of commercial plugins, too, and haven't yet found anything. I also thought that perhaps I need to look at something where people are signing up for an "event"... that then shows the list of people who have signed up. Perhaps some kind of event/meeting plugin could be repurposed this way.

And yes, I could probably kludge this together in some way by hacking away on a customized WordPress theme or something like that... but I don't have the time or interest in doing that.

So let me throw it out here... HAVE ANY OF YOU USED ANYTHING THAT WOULD DO WHAT I WANT?

Either free/open source or commercial... I'm interested in either.

Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thanks!


A Bonus Question - Logos?

You'll see at the bottom of the submission form that I say that organizations should send their logo to me via email. What I ideally want to do is have a third column on the Organizations table where I can display a standard size thumbnail of the logos of the various organizations.

Ideally I'd love it if the form interface could allow someone to upload a logo which, again, could just be approved as part of the moderation process.

But that's the ideal world... right now I'd take just getting the names in there so that I can avoid the whole copy/paste in email thing. :-)

Speaking of that, a bunch of signatories came in overnight... time to go do some copy/pasting...