Custom Testimonials for WordPress

In this tutorial, I will be teaching you how to create a Testimonials section on your WordPress website without using any testimonials plugin. There are certainly many different plugins you could use to accept and display testimonials on your site but sometimes these plugins don’t cut it especially if you want to really customize the info collected from the user or how to output the testimonial. This tutorial will use the following plugins:

• Custom Post Types UI to create the custom post type “Testimonials”
• Advanced Custom Fields to create the data for the testimonials
• Gravity Forms to create the form that accepts user input
• Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types to assign input to our CPT’s

Create the “Testimonials” Custom Post Type

Like any testimonials plugin, we will be creating a Testimonials custom post type. To do this, we will be using the Custom Post Types UI plugin, a very popular plugin that lets you create custom post types without code.

We won’t be worrying about creating any taxonomies because we don’t need to organize/categorize our testimonials. Set up your Testimonials custom post type like this:

• Post Type Name => testimonial
• Label => Testimonials
• Singular Label => Testimonial
• Description => Enter a description if you want
• Public => True
• Show UI => True
• Has Archive => False
• Exclude Fro Search => True
• Capability Type => Post
• Hierarchical => False
• Rewrite => True
• Custom Rewrite Slug => Defaults to “testimonial”
• With Front => True
• Query Var => True
• Menu Position => Not needed
• Show in Menu => True
• Menu Icon => Not needed but you can enter your own icon URL
• Suppports => None
• Built-in Taxonomies => None

The last two in this list will be set to none because we don’t need any of the standard WordPress fields and, since we don’t need any taxonomies, we don’t need the built-in options. Save your custom post type.

Create the “Testimonials” Custom Fields

Now that our custom post type is in place, we need to create some custom fields. This will be the data we want to collect when a new testimonial is submitted. Using Advanced Custom Fields, add a new custom fields group called “Testimonials”. Create three fields (Author, Website, Testimonial) with the following setups:

Fields

Field Label => Author
Field Name => author
Field Type => Text
Field Instructions => Name of person leaving testimonial
Required => Yes
Default Value => None
Placeholder Text => None
Prepend => None
Append => None
Formatting => No formatting
Character Limit => None
Conditional Logic => None

Field Label => Website
Field Name => website
Field Type => Text
Field Instructions => Website of the person leaving the testimonial
Required => Yes
Default Value => None
Placeholder Text => None
Prepend => None
Append => None
Formatting => No formatting
Character Limit => None
Conditional Logic => None

Field Label => Testimonial
Field Name => testimonial
Field Type => Text Area
Field Instructions => The testimonial
Required => Yes
Default Value => None
Placeholder Text => None
Character Limit => None
Rows => 8
Formatting => Convert new lines into
tags
Conditional Logic => None

Location

Rules => Show this field group if “Post Type” “is equal to” “testimonial”

Options

Order No. => 0
Position => High (after title)
Style => Standard (WP metabox)
Hide on screen => Check (hide) everything except Permalink

Create the Testimonials Form

We’re two-thirds there. We’ve create the custom post type and our custom fields. Now we just need to create the form. Again, we will be using Gravity Forms do this.

First thing is to install Gravity Forms. Once installed, you will install the Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types plugin. By default, Gravity Forms lets you create forms that can be used to create Posts. This is an amazingly powerful feature. However, it does not support custom post types. The Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types plugin integrates support for custom post types into Gravity Forms.

Once we’ve got those plugins installed, we can get to work on the testimonials form. Create a new form called “Testimonials”. We will be adding five fields to this form:

Title

We need to give our testimonial a title. In this tutorial, we are going to assign the author’s name as the title. In the form editor screen, add a title field (found under “Post Fields”). We will come back to this field in just a moment.

“Your Email”

This field isn’t necessary but we will collect the author’s email. You can leave this out if you prefer not to collect it. To add it, click the Email block under “Advanced Fields”. You can make it optional or required.

“Your Name/Website/Testimonial” (custom fields)

Here is where we get into the custom fields we set up. When the user enters his or her name in this field, we want it to be assigned to the “author” custom field we created before. Under the Post Fields area of the form editor, there is an option for “Custom Field”. Add one for the author’s name. Enter the field label, make it a single line text box, and assign it as an exiting custom field named “author”. It also needs to be a required field since we made this custom field required in Advanced Custom Fields. Repeat this step for “Your Website” (‘website’ custom field) and “Your Testimonial” (‘testimonial’ custom field). Note that you can change the form labels from “Your Name/Website/Testimonial” to whatever you want. As long as you assign the form field to the correct custom field you will be fine.

Back to Title

Now it’s time to go back and configure the Title field we first added to our form. You can set the title to something generic, like “Title”.

Next, you need to set the post status when someone submits a testimonial. Draft and Published are the most common. Draft will keep the testimonial in a draft status for you to manually publish and Published will automatically publish it. To prevent unwanted posts of any content type, you may want to set this to Draft.

You will also set the default post author, which can be any registered user with at least an Author role.

The Post Category is not important here since we aren’t assigning the form submission to a post (it’s a custom post type).

The “Create content template” section is important because we are setting the title to be the author’s name. Gravity Forms uses merge tags to use field values in other places. We will be using a merge tag to input the author’s name in this section, which will then assign the name to the title. There’s a little icon to the right of the input box that will let you choose a tag to insert. Select the tag of the “Your Name” (or whatever you named the Name form field). See the image below.

Next, we need to make the form save as a Testimonial custom post type. Under the Advanced tab, you will see the section that reads “Save As Post Type”. Select the Testimonials post type.

The final step in creating the Testimonials submission form is to set the title field visibility to “Admin Only” (also under the Advanced tab). This will hide the field to front-end users but will display the title in the admin.

Displaying Testimonials

To display the testimonials you are now accepting, you will need to create a custom template (archive and/or single) or modify an existing template. I will save display methods for another post and update this one when it’s available.

Conclusion

If you followed the directions in this post, you are now ready to roll with a simple testimonials system that can be easily built on. This post’s method and ideas can be used for any custom content, not just testimonials. If you have questions, feel free to post them in the comments!