Secure CMS comment submission form field customization: How to meet your unique business needs?

Today, in the increasingly refined field of digital marketing, every interactive link on the website carries the important mission of collecting user feedback and deepening user relationships.The comment section, as a place where users directly interact with content, the flexibility of the submitted form directly affects whether we can efficiently obtain the information we need.As an experienced website operations expert, I deeply understand that AnQiCMS (AnQi content management system) provides strong support for small and medium-sized enterprises and content operation teams with its efficient and customizable features.However, when business requirements go beyond the conventional "name, email, comment content", how to customize the input fields of the comment submission form has become a practical problem in front of us.

AnQi CMS was designed with the philosophy of high customization and easy expansion.We can customize the field structure of articles, products, and other content in its flexible content model according to business needs to achieve personalized content display.Similarly, the system settings and contact information settings also provide the function of "custom setting parameters", allowing us to flexibly expand the basic information of the website.These demonstrate the powerful adaptability of AnQiCMS.

However, when we focus on the specific scenario of the 'comment submission form', we find an interesting phenomenon.archive_id）、username（user_name）、comment content（content）as well as the parent comment ID（parent_id）。These fields are sufficient to meet the needs of most website comment interactions.If your business requires users to provide additional information when commenting, such as 'industry', 'contact phone number', or 'intended product model', directly modifying the comment form is not as intuitive as modifying the content model.

When delving deeper into the functionality of AnQiCMS, we find that although the comment form itself does not directly provide a backend configuration entry for custom fields, the "Function Management" under the "Website Message" module does provide a very complete custom field function.Since version v2.0.0-alpha3, AnQiCMS has added support for custom message fields.This provides us with a clever idea to meet the need for similar customized information collection in comment sections.

Draw on the "website message" feature to implement flexible form field expansion

The core of the 'Website Message' feature lies in its highly configurable form fields. You can find and manage these fields in the AnQiCMS backend by the following path: 功能管理-u003e网站留言-u003e自定义留言字段Here, you can add various types of fields according to your business needs, including:

  • Single-line text:Suitable for collecting brief text information, such as name, company name.
  • Number:Restrict input to numbers, suitable for phone numbers, quantities, etc.
  • Multi-line text:Suitable for collecting longer descriptive information.
  • Single choice:Provide preset options, the user can only select one, such as gender, region.
  • Multiple selection:Options are provided as presets, but users can select multiple options as they like, such as product types they are interested in.
  • Dropdown selection:Similar to single selection, but presented in a dropdown menu to save page space.

Each custom field can be set to have its 'parameter name' (for template calls), 'field name' (database storage), 'field type', 'required', and 'default value' (for selection fields, it is a list of options).AnQiCMS will automatically generate the corresponding HTML form elements based on these settings and perform data validation when submitted.

The strategy of applying the customization ability of '留言' to the '评论' scenario

Since the comment form does not have a direct entry for custom fields, while the message function does, we can take the following strategies to meet business needs:

  1. Guide the user to use the "Leave a message" feature instead:If your "comment" is actually for collecting more complex business consultation or cooperation intention, then redefining it as "message" may be more appropriate.You can place a prominent "Consult/Cooperate" button at the bottom of the article detail page, which, when clicked, will jump to a customized message page, or load the message form in a pop-up on the current page.Thus, you can fully utilize the custom fields of the message function to collect the required information, and manage it uniformly through the "website message" management function in the background.

  2. Front-end logic assistance, back-end merging processing (suitable for a small number of custom fields):If you persist in collecting additional information under the existing comment submission UI, and the amount of information is not large, you can consider implementing it with the help of front-end JavaScript.

    • First, manually add the required input fields (such as a 'industry' text box) in the HTML template of the comment submission form.
    • When the user clicks the submit comment, use JavaScript to intercept the submit event and read the values of these custom fields.
    • Attach this additional information to the original comment content (contentField) be merged, for example, by appending "Industry: [User-entered industry]" to the end of thecontentfield.
    • Finally, submit the processed form data to the AnQiCMS comment release interface (/comment/publish）。 This way requires you to write your own frontend logic to ensure the correct merging and formatting of data, and manually parse out these additional information when viewing comments in the background.The advantage is that it maintains consistency in the comment section, while the disadvantage is that it increases the cost of front-end development and the complexity of back-end data processing.

  3. Develop custom plugins or secondary development:For users with high development capabilities or special business requirements, consider二次开发 based on the modular design of AnQiCMS and the Go language features, or developing dedicated plugins.This will allow you to directly modify the comment module's logic, add custom field storage, management, and display.AnQiCMS's modular design and high-performance architecture provide a good foundation for this kind of deep customization.

Summary of implementation steps (taking the use of the message function as an example)

If you choose to use the message function to meet the needs of custom fields, the following is a general implementation step:

  1. Configure custom message fields on the backend:

    • Log in to the AnQiCMS backend, go to "Function Management" -> "Website Messages".
    • Click "Custom message field", add all necessary input fields according to your business needs.For example, add a 'article ID' numeric field to associate with a specific article.
    • Save these settings.

  2. Modify the template file, introduce the message form:

    • Find the template file displayed in your website theme that shows the comment section or where you want to place a custom form, usually the template for article detail pages (for examplearticle/detail.htmlor genericarchive/detail.html)
    • at the appropriate location, using{% guestbook fields %}Label to retrieve and render the comment form fields defined in the backend.
    • Key:Add a hidden field in the form to automatically retrieve the current article's ID and assign it to the 'Parent Article ID' field you have customized in the backend. For example: `twig