Using Multiple Page PHP forms

Hi,
Please excuse my lack of detail but I’m new to all this and not sure what the right question to ask is. I am trying to teach myself a bit about Wordpress and web developing in general - mainly to keep up with my kids :o).

I have a locally hosted Wordpress Site using WAMP Server.
I am using the Shapley theme to set some basic formatting and templates, and build a personal web site to teach me about Wordpress and Themes etc.
I have modified this theme by creating my own child theme and overriding things like css and various template files to make it do a little bit more like I want.(OK butcher may be a word closer to the truth - sorry)

I have the desire to create a “wizard” type form. I know I can buy plugins that say they make all these things easy but I want to learn how to do it “properly”! My thought is to use PHP to do this, and end up with a nice “form” that applies conditional logic, exception handling and multiple pages depending on what data is entered.

So I found some information that said when using wordpress / themes that I can over-ride the template for the page and put my custom PHP in there So in my Shapely-Child theme in my page-templates folder I have created modified versions of the Sidebar theme that runs some PHP. This to my surprise actually works.

So I thought - fine lets make another custom page template for the second form page and put more info in that.
This also works. I can preview each wordpress page and in isolation they work.

However - I can not get the first page “next” button to call the second page successfully. It just “404’s” no matter what type of link I try to add to the form action in the first page.

After mucking about with this for quite a while - I believe most of the issue is that I am probably not going about this in the correct way, and if not what is the right way to achieve what I want?

In summary - I would like to keep using the Shapely theme and build a page into it that starts a “wizard” that has conditional logic in it and can display multiple pages. I am aware I can probably buy something to do this, but as the exercise is to learn I would like to understand how best to do this using WordPress / Shapely and PHP?:

I also except that once i get this sorted I have to work out how to store records in MySQL but first things first :o)

Any help / comments or pointers will be much appreciated.
Thanks
Clive

Hi Cleve

Welcome in WordPress and welcome here :slight_smile:
I have the desire to create a “wizard” type form - Definitely, this is not possible without third party plugins in theme, or without a major development of completely new software, there is no such feature in the theme

Clive, please take my apologies, but please always keep your message as short as possible :slight_smile: