The contribute form creates articles on your website. Media items uploaded with the form are saved in the iCM media library and related to the contributed article.
Page Title and Content
Contribute uses the Forms Service template. Its page title and content appear as described for that template.
The Contribute Form
Security
The contribute form article should be secured to a group of website users. This means that when the form is submitted, the identity of the contributor is known, allowing the submission to be tracked and managed using the Self Service and User Request templates.
Content
The example above includes fields that will populate the text areas of an iCM article, a file upload field for media item that will be related to the final article, and a series of checkboxes to categorise the article using metadata values.
The fields on this form are completely arbitrary. Whichever fields you decide to include are be mapped to properties that iCM understands - see Form Configuration for more information.
Parent Article
The form also lets the user decide where the new article will be created. The potential parent articles in the drop-down are set in the End Point Configuration. The ID of the current user is checked against those articles, with the drop-down only including articles the user has access to view.
Category
Categories are mainly used by the Event and Service contribute forms. Picking a category adds metadata to the created article, which is then used by other templates, like the Calendar and Event Search to refine results or control the events that get displayed.
The categories available to be picked are taken from the metadata group set in the End Point Configuration - every metadata value beneath the set group appears as a checkbox.
Form Submission
When the form is submitted it starts a workflow process that creates or updates the article and any media items and, depending upon the configuration, generates the self service tasks to archive, copy and update. These tasks can be carried out by users in the candidate group defined in the contribute form.
Once the process has started one of two things may happen. In most cases a configurable confirmation message is displayed. In the case of events, users can be redirected to a second form, ready to schedule its dates, times and location.
The content that gets created can be put through an approval process before it appears on your site.
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