Create content entries from form submissions (forms plugin)

[rmakk]

Editorial sites commonly need form submissions to flow into the content pipeline as draft entries. This is a well-established CMS pattern -- WordPress plugins like Ninja Forms and Gravity Forms have "create post from submission" as a feature.

I'm migrating a newsroom from WordPress to EmDash. They have event submission, obituary submission, and press release submission forms that currently create draft custom post types in WordPress for editorial review before publishing. Today, plugin-forms stores submissions in its own inbox, which is useful for review, but there's no path from submission to content entry without manual re-entry.

Proposal

Add an optional contentMapping setting to FormSettings that, when configured, creates a content entry (default: draft) in a target collection after a successful submission. The submission is still stored in the forms inbox regardless -- this is additive.

// Per-form setting in FormSettings
contentMapping?: {
  collection: string;           // target collection slug, e.g. "events"
  fieldMappings: Record<string, string | {
    field: string;
    transform?: 'portableText' | 'string' | 'number' | 'date';
  }>;
  status?: 'draft' | 'published';  // default: 'draft'
  slugFrom?: string;            // form field to derive slug from
  metadata?: Record<string, unknown>;  // extra fields, e.g. { source: 'form' }
};

Capability change: The plugin would add content:write to its declared capabilities, giving it access to ctx.content in handlers. This only activates for forms that have contentMapping configured.

Happy to open up a PR to add this functionality.

Disclaimer -- Written with AI but reviewed by me before posting.

[masonjames]

I like it!

This feels like a decent addition as it helps emdash build real editorial workflows.

Strong-agree that it should default to (or perhaps only) make a draft post. The content:write capability is the right place for this. We'll likely want specific tests around the transform.

Additional considerations:

• Validate mapping against the target collection/fields when the form is saved, not only at submit time.
• Preserve submission even when content creation fails
• Use the same core content-create behavior as the admin/API path for slug generation

Useful tests:

• no mapping keeps current behavior
• successful mapping creates a draft and keeps the inbox submission
• invalid mappings are rejected on form save
• submit-time create failures don’t lose the submission.

[MA2153]

Agree with @masonjames . One specific edge case I want to note because it has not been explicitly mentioned: Make sure all required fields are mapped, otherwise content creation will always fail.

[rmakk]

I created a PR for this, #2099