Submissions adds a small set of pages to your Portal so members can find, complete, and manage submissions without you building those pages from scratch. This article explains what those pages do, how members move through them, and why they use your space’s terms instead of generic words like “record” or “entry.”
The Pages, in the Order a Member Uses Them
Submission Center. This is the member’s starting point. It shows each space currently available to the signed-in member as a card, with the space name and short description when one exists. The member clicks a card to open that space’s page. In the Portal menu, this page appears under ONLINE-FORMS › Browse Online Forms.
View Submission Space. The member opens this page from a card on the Submission Center. It shows one space, including its description, a button to start a new submission, and a table of the member’s past submissions to that space with their dates and statuses. For an organization-owned space, the member’s submissions include every submission made for their organization by any of its contacts, not only the ones that member submitted personally.
Warning
Closing a space removes it from the Portal entirely, including for members who already submitted to it. A member can no longer find or open past submissions to a closed space, so close a space only when you’re sure members no longer need to refer back to what they submitted there.
Create Submission. The member opens this page from the Submit button on a space’s page. It runs the space’s submission process so the member can complete and submit a new entry.
View Submission. The member opens this page by clicking one of their submissions in the table. It shows that single submission.
Edit Submission. The member reaches this page from the submission’s own page when editing is allowed. It lets the member change what they submitted.
A member’s usual path is Submission Center → a space → Create Submission. Later, they return to that space to check the status, or they open View Submission and, when allowed, Edit Submission.
Why the Pages Use Your Space's Own Words
Every space has its own singular and plural name for a submission, such as “nomination” and “nominations” or “abstract” and “abstracts.” Every Portal form space must have both fields. The Online Forms pages use those terms throughout, including headings like “My Nominations,” buttons like “Submit Nomination,” and messages like “You have not submitted any nominations.” Rhythm title-cases these names for display, even though they are stored in lowercase, so you can enter them however you like.
On these submissions-scoped pages, the built-in Name field on a submission no longer fills in with the submitting contact’s name. That auto-fill was removed for form submissions that come from Online Forms pages; it is specific to this part of the Portal, not every form experience your account runs.
Abstract submission instructions from your abstract settings appear on the Abstract Center page, which is the member-facing entry point for abstracts. They do not automatically appear everywhere a member might encounter the submission flow. If your instructions seem to be missing, make sure you are looking at the Abstract Center itself rather than another page in the flow.
Placing These Pages on Your Portal
A site builder does not need to hand-code these pages. In the Portal page designer, Submissions adds a category of building blocks that a site builder can drag directly onto a page. The category includes one block for the Submission Center, one for a space’s own page, one for creating a submission, one for viewing a submission, and one for editing a submission. When a site builder places a block on a page, that page shows the matching screen to members who open it.
These blocks link to one another using default web addresses, so pages built from them work without a site builder wiring each link by hand. If your association needs one of these pages to use a different address than the default, check that page’s settings in the designer. Only one submitter page currently has a setting for changing where it links next; the rest use their built-in defaults.
Whether a member sees a success message after submitting depends on how the form’s own last page is set up, not on anything in Submissions itself. A member sees the success message only when the form’s final page is configured as a completion page. If the form instead ends by sending the member on to view or edit their submission, they will not see that message.
If you want a standalone form experience that is not part of this Submission Center flow, you can build one from a Portal Form space in Submissions & Reviews. Create a Portal page just for that form’s Create Submission block, then link to that page from your own Portal navigation instead of routing people through Browse Online Forms.
Tip
The same building-block category also includes a separate set of blocks for reviewers and review-team administrators. Those blocks build the Reviews pages, which work the same way but are a separate part of the Portal experience from the Online Forms pages described here.
Installing the abstracts feature on an event no longer references older, legacy abstract Portal pages the way it once did. A newly installed event now gets the current set of pages described in this article.
Related
For the shared mechanics of the forms these pages run, see Web Forms Explained. For how a space’s eligibility, window, and limit rules decide which forms a member is actually offered, see How Rhythm Decides What a Member Can Submit.