For many years we used Form2Content to allow non-technical users to add complex pages that had to be formatted in a very specific way. The developer of this component announced some time ago that they would not be transitioning it to J4.
Whatever the new solution it needed to meet the following criteria.
- The content should be templated
- Users fill in a form to generate the content
- Frontend editing
- Real, searchable content
- Ability to set metadata, publish end time etc. without the user having to set them.
- Simple - should be obvious to non-technical users how to publish without needing an exhaustive manual
- Lightweight and using Joomla core where possible.
After much testing of different solutions, I decided to leverage the power of Fields and use a content plugin together with a layout to generate the actual page content.
It should be noted that although the plugin can be installed and used with no modification, the intention is that developers customise it to suit their needs and at a minimum override the layout. Files and full instructions can be found on the plugin page.