• Streamlined Submission: A new user-facing form allows contributors to submit full articles, including proposed titles, author biographies, and headshots or supporting images.

• Editorial Control: All submissions are automatically funneled into the Continuum admin as "Needs Review," allowing your editorial team to review, edit, and approve content before it goes live.

• Customizable Fields: Capture essential contributor data, including name, email, company, and job title, alongside their content. 

Where contributors submit articles

The submission form lives at /article/submission on your site. Link to it from your navigation, a landing page, or anywhere you want to invite contributions.

What the form collects

By default, contributors provide:

• Contributor information: name, email, company, and job title
• Content: proposed title, the article text or an uploaded file, an author bio, and a headshot or supporting image
• Agreement to your editorial terms

Reviewing submissions

Every submission arrives in the admin with a status of Needs Review, so nothing goes live without your approval. To find them, go to the Article list and filter by the User-Submitted attribute or status. From there you can review, edit, and publish as you would any other article.

User Article Submission

User Article Submission lets a logged-in visitor draft and submit an article directly into Continuum for editorial review, without ever touching your CMS login. Instead of emailing a press release or filling out a generic contact form, contributors, sources, and community members can submit ready-to-format articles through a branded page on your own site.

The submission goes straight into your editorial articles list, tagged and unpublished, so nothing appears live until your team reviews and approves it.

Why Use It

• Capture more contributed content: press releases, community announcements, guest columns, and sponsor-submitted news, without extra staff intervention on the front end.
• Keep full editorial control: every submission lands unpublished in a review queue. Nothing goes live until an editor approves it.
• Protect your site from malicious content: submitted formatting is sanitized automatically, and file uploads are validated for type and size.
• No workflow disruption: submissions appear inside Continuum alongside your regular content, so editors work in the same place they already do.

The Visitor Experience

A logged-in user visits your article submission page and fills out a simple form:

• Headline (up to 100 characters) and subhead (up to 250 characters), each with a live counter.
• Article body (up to 6,000 characters), written in a lightweight formatting editor with bold, italic, lists, and links.
• Optional company name and a link (must be http or https).
• Up to three topics, if your site has topics configured.
• An optional photo (JPG, PNG, or GIF, up to 2 MB), which is resized automatically to fit the article image slot.

If a visitor isn't logged in, they're sent to your login page and returned to the form automatically afterward. If JavaScript is disabled in the visitor's browser, the formatting editor falls back to a plain text box and paragraph breaks are preserved.

Once submitted, the visitor sees a thank-you page. Behind the scenes, the article is created in Continuum with a post date left blank, so it exists in your system but is not visible anywhere on the live site until an editor publishes it.

The Editorial Review Process

When a submission comes in, your staff notification address receives an email with the submitter's details, the headline, and the article ID, flagged as needing review.

Editors find pending submissions in Continuum by filtering for the Needs Review tag. From there, the normal editorial workflow applies:

• Review and edit the article as needed, exactly as with any other Continuum article.
• Set a post date to publish it to the live site.
• Remove the Needs Review tag once it's been handled.

Every approved submission also carries a permanent Article Submission tag, so you can always identify and report on user-generated content separately from staff-written articles.

Note: If a submission fails validation, such as a missing required field, a disallowed link type, or an oversized file, the form re-displays with an error message and nothing is saved. No partial articles and no notification emails go out for rejected attempts.

Turning the Feature On

The feature ships off by default. To enable it for a site, an implementation team member updates the following in Continuum:

Optional Configuration

These settings let you tailor the feature to a specific site's editorial needs. None are required to launch.

Content Safeguards

• Formatting is sanitized: script tags, inline event handlers, and javascript: links are automatically stripped from submitted content before it's saved.
• Links are restricted to http and https only; other link types are rejected at submission.
• Photo uploads are limited to image file types and 2 MB, and are automatically resized to fit the article image placement.
• A company name entered on a submission becomes a searchable keyword on the article, and is reused automatically if that company has been tagged before.
• Where your site has reCAPTCHA configured, it's validated automatically on submission. Sites without reCAPTCHA rely on the login requirement plus a hidden spam trap field.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can we skip the review queue and publish submissions instantly?

Yes. Turning on the auto-publish setting gives submissions a post date immediately, so they go live without manual review. The notification email will reflect that the article was published rather than flagging it for review.

Can we require submitters to categorize their announcement?

Yes. Adding options under the Article Submission taxonomy adds a required category selector to the form, and the choice is tagged on the resulting article.

Does this replace our existing press release or contact form?

It can. Because submissions land directly in Continuum as structured, formatted articles rather than an email your team has to manually re-enter, many publishers use it to replace a generic contact form for press releases and community announcements.

What happens if a visitor isn't logged in?

They're redirected to your site's login page and returned to the submission form automatically once they sign in, so no progress is lost.