Ben Meredith
Forum Replies Created
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Hey @karimlo,
I dug in and found your ticket here internally, and we’re helping there.
I did want to publicly respond to give as much context as possible, here.
You are exactly right that it’s unacceptable for priority support tickets to string along for weeks. While it’s no consolation to you, we really do resolve the vast majority of issues in 3-5 business days. Your issues proved to be the perfect combination of things we can fix, things your web host needs to help with, and things your Payment gateway needs to help with. The power of WordPress (as you know) is that we as plugins don’t have full access to your site, and that makes support trickier.
Having reviewed the tickets you’ve submitted, I definitely see areas we could have done better, and this review has sparked an internal discussion about that. Thanks for that, truly.
Of course I want to earn back your trust (and perhaps some of the missing stars here!), as folks like you recommending GiveWP to their clients are a HUGE part of the GiveWP community.
Let’s continue the conversation over in priority support. Your clients’ success with online donations is our number one priority.
Forum: Reviews
In reply to: [GiveWP - Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform] Styling is a nightmareHey @aalandes!
I actually appreciate you reaching out, and let me be the first to agree with you, adding custom styles to GiveWP in its current state is no fun at all (unless you use the Legacy form template, where it’s still quite easy).
There’s a long backstory to the reasons for that, and even better, a bright future ahead for developers who want to make fully customized form templates without all of the headaches that are currently involved.
First, an abbreviated backstory: back when the legacy template was the only template there was a common refrain among the vast majority of end users of “why does my form look so bad with my theme?”
That refrain was based on the fact that the legacy template was not defensively styled at all, and themes (or other plugins) could easily (and usually inadvertently) mess up the styles of GiveWP forms. Even one unspecific selector targeting
inputcould make for a difficult time making the Donation Form do the one thing it needed to do: raise money for the organization.That led to the decision (starting in version 2.7 back in 2020) to create new templates that are more resistant to style changes. The Multi-Step form template (version 2.7) and the Classic template (version 2.18) are both displayed in an iframe, and much more difficult for themes and other plugins to inadvertently mess with. Those
!importantdeclarations you’ve run into are in there, for sure.That has led to a dramatic decrease in folks reaching out with broken forms, and an increase in requests from folks like you who want to style things. I know it’s no consolation to hear “we chose to intentionally frustrate third party developers, in favor of end users” but that’s exactly the tradeoff we made.
The legacy template is still there, and fully supported. It will be as long as I have any say in things (I do) or until there’s a way for developers and others to more easily customize form templates. If I were custom-styling a form template today, I’d use exclusively the Legacy template, and I’d disable the built-in GiveWP styles in the settings, and start fresh. I’d make it clear to any clients that they can use Multi-Step or classic templates, styled as-is, or if they want custom styles, we can put together a Legacy template form that looks exactly how they want it.
That leads to the good news: in the near(ish) future, we are totally overhauling the form building experience, and really the underlying architecture that is used to create forms, separating form functionality from form display in lots of ways.
This change will make way for developers like yourself to easily and programmatically create entirely custom templates. No more “I can’t style this button” and more “Here’s a simple template API to create buttons with classes to match my theme.”
GiveWP version 3.0 has a fairly public roadmap that we are excited about, and inviting folks like yourself to join in. We’ve had public previews in the form of a Town Hall meeting, and plan to have another, taking into account user and third-party developer feedback as we build the next generation of GiveWP. You can sign up to be notified here: https://givewp.com/lps/next-generation-donation-forms/
I’ve honestly never resonated more with a 1-star review, and I do appreciate you reaching out. I’m happy to clarify in any way, and do appreciate you using GiveWP. Your clients’ success with online donations is our number one priority.
Hi @nmf101a
Apologies for the slow turnaround here. I just tried to replicate a similar problem on a test install I have using Divi and GiveWP and was not able to. My hunch here is that some other plugin or perhaps even Divi itself has functionality that is not playing nicely with the content/text section set up in GiveWP’s donation form, here.
I tried various ways of replicating the problem, and haven’t hit the exact right one yet.
Are you using a plugin to control External Links? A brief search for clues here led me to the External Links plugin, which adds a tag of
data-wpel-link=internalto links on a site, and I’m seeing that tag on the link on your forms. That could be a fruitless search, but I wanted to mention it.What is supposed to display in that section is the description put into the form settings, in step one. If there’s an excerpt on the form, it will override that.
My hunch is that something on your site is customizing that excerpt, which is causing this issue. I made a quick screencast to demonstrate:
Let me know if I can clarify further. I’m happy to help.
Hi folks! Here’s a Screencast showing you how to fix it:
Password: PayPal
https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/c3Q3qOVOGCsLet me know if that doesn’t resolve things.
Hey folks!
First, I want to apologize: I was under the incorrect impression that this issue was only affecting *sandbox* (testing) PayPal accounts, and that’s part of the reason that this issue slipped off of my radar. I discovered in digging into it today that the issue is less about it being a sandbox account, and more about it being an account that is under review on PayPal’s side. That’s my oversight for sure.
That said, two things:
- We are looking into a fix that will prevent this from happening
- I made a screencast showing you how to resolve it in the meantime. The password to view the screencast is “PayPal” (no quotes, but capitalization matters) https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/c3Q3qOVOGCs
Important notes from the screencast:
- The SQL Buddy plugin is super powerful, and you can really mess up your site if you don’t know what you’re doing. Have a backup ready if you’re unsure about things.
- If you are in GiveWP test mode, the option you are looking to remove is
give_paypal_commerce_sandbox_accountbut if you are not in test mode, it’sgive_paypal_commerce_live_account - The table you should be looking in is the wp_options table. Your site may have a different prefix than
wp_.
Let us know if you have any problems.
Hi @jvblondon
I reviewed all of your tickets in our priority support system and just sent you a message there in the hopes that we can resolve your issues. Let’s definitely keep the conversation going over there.
If we can’t help you to resolve the outstanding issues we’ll even extend the 30-day refund policy in this case since you’ve been a paying customer for just a few months. Your success with online donations is our number one priority.
Your issues seem to be related to export and import of donation data and the Gift Aid add-on, but I’m looking for as much clarity as possible from you because I don’t currently fully understand your overall goal and how our premium add-ons are not living up to your expectations.
I do appreciate the kind words about our free features, as we work very hard to ensure that GiveWP is the go-to choice for organizations that can’t afford upfront costs in online fundraising.
Forum: Reviews
In reply to: [GiveWP - Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform] NightmareHey @lanceorndorff
I’ve replied to your priority support ticket, and we’ll be happy to issue a refund (even outside of our normal policy) for you, if we don’t get things sorted out.
I did want to provide a bit more context here as well, for public consumption.
The first (two) issues that you came across in the last couple of months were legit bugs that slipped through the cracks of our Quality Assurance protocol, which is especially frustrating for me as I’ve been working for months now to shore up and expand the amount of testing we do before releases, to mitigate two things: (1) fatal errors that take down the site and (2) payment gateway errors that take down donations.
You “won” the “lottery” by catching both of those bugs *after* they made it out. Since then we’ve added specific automated tests to our pre-release steps that will catch those and similar bugs before they see the light of day.
Note that we patched both bugs in fewer than 24 hours and alerted every impacted customer immediately. Best case would have been to catch them before they went out, but next-best is to act quickly to fix them.
This most recent issue was one with a premium gateway add-on that needs to validate ZIP codes before submitting the donation, and some of your donors appear to be clicking through too fast before the ZIP code field appears. That field is controlled completely by the payment gateway (for PCI-compliance reasons) and not something that we have any influence over, speed or otherwise.
I can certainly appreciate how a 1-2 punch of a gateway becoming non-responsive, followed by this issue would tend to reduce your trust in our product, and I’m here to help. Let’s continue the conversation over on our Priority support channel.
Your success with online donations is our number one priority, and I definitely want to earn back your trust.
Hi @omarscf!
We’re not allowed by forum rules to provide support for premium add-ons (like Recurring Donations). Definitely reach out to our priority support team (we’re closed over the weekend) and we’ll be happy to help.
Briefly, the issue is almost certainly related to setting up the Stripe webhook, which is outlined in our documentation at https://givewp.com/documentation/add-ons/recurring-donations/supported-payment-gateways/stripe/
Thanks!
Forum: Plugins
In reply to: [GiveWP - Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform] Square add on for GiveWPHey @bushido1
We’re not technically allowed to answer pre-sales questions here. Definitely reach out to us at https://givewp.com/contact-us and we’re happy to chat there.
You can also find more information on our fees here, in the FAQ section (the question about Stripe) at the bottom of the page: https://givewp.com/pricing/
Thanks!
Forum: Plugins
In reply to: [GiveWP - Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform] Salesforce SandboxHi @enclude
We’re not allowed by forum rules to provide support here for premium add-ons, but the answer to your question is “yes.”
There’s a separate button/link for connecting to the sandbox.
If you have any followup questions regarding paid products, definitely reach out via priority support. https://givewp.com/support
We’re happy to walk you through the process!
Hey @jononoy
Well that’s certainly not what we want.
What’s going on here is some sort of database issue preventing storing the revenue, which is stopping the database update from running. I’m not sure at all if that’s related to the donation not going through, though. We’ve seen that issue in the past, and it’s unrelated to donation processing completely. So while we do want to resolve that database-related error, I’m more keen to focus on what might be causing donations to fail.
First: Is donation 11233 a new donation or an older one?
Next: are you seeing the donation at the payment gateway at all?
Also: are any of the logs related to Payment Errors, as opposed to
The fix for the error in your message is straightforward:
Check in your donations list for any donation that does not have an associated donation form, and add a form to it (or delete that donation) and you should be all set. Once all of them are associated with a form, that database update will run.
First, I reached out to the KadenceWP theme team to figure out why their setting for loading Google Fonts locally was not respecting that GiveWP font, and they were able to pinpoint the issue, and look to have a release very soon that will resolve that!
Next, thanks for the revised review! I really appreciate it.
Have a great day.
I really appreciate the opportunity to clarify here. I’ve made a screencast showing you a method of never loading fonts from external sources on the front end of the site. You can view that screencast here:
password: fonts
https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/c3jbDOVTQ4bI’ve also added your vote and comment to this feedback post on our site: https://feedback.givewp.com/feature-requests/p/global-option-for-font-loading
That feature request has not seen a lot of votes, but I agree it would be handy to have a site-wide setting for disabling those fonts. Vote and comment there.
As for a consent policy, I’d highly recommend that you add a note to your privacy page included by default in WordPress. You can see it at example.com/wp-admin/options-privacy.php?tab=policyguide (replacing example.com with your site URL)
Given the workaround above, you’d only need to gain consent from logged-in users for connecting to that font server, but you could also add it to the front end if you prefer to use the Donor Dashboard and other features of GiveWP that load fonts from external resources.
I do think our response in the support forum could have been more clear, and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify. Hopefully this clarification can earn back some of the stars you left off of your rating!
Hi @emirastudio!
Very glad you reached out here. WooCommerce and GiveWP are not compatible in that way, since essentially Woo and GiveWP function as the engines driving ecommerce and donations (respectively), not just as payment gateways.
To add a different payment gateway to GiveWP, your options are to purchase one of the premium gateway add-ons that are sold on our site (I’m not linking to them because the support forums at ww.wp.xz.cn are explicitly *not* for sales), or to create your own payment gateway add-on. There are also some third-party payment gateway add-ons that members of the community have created and distribute on the Plugin Directory.
Finally, we are always listening to users, and many different payment gateway add-ons have been requested by our users. We use feedback.givewp.com as a way of tracking interest in those add-ons, so go and search there to see if the gateway that you’re looking to use has been requested, and vote or comment there.
The key things we are looking for in building new payment gateway integrations are:
1. A robust and well-documented API for developers to create the add-on.
2. A significant user base of that gateway.
3. A sandbox or testing environment which allows us to support the gateway well for our users.If all of those criteria are met, we’re happy to look into creating an add-on for that gateway.
Let’s continue the conversation over on our feedback site. We’re happy to clarify further.
(I’m marking this post as resolved because this type of conversation is not appropriate for the support forums)
Hey @cheezman I was unaware of the ability to donate to PayPal in ZAR. I don’t see PayPal enabled on that page you link to, so I am not able to test that theory, but last I checked, PayPal does not accept ZAR.
When you are redirected, is the URL one from your site, or one from PayPal itself?
The reason I ask is that once you are taken away to PayPal, GiveWP is in a holding pattern waiting to hear back from the gateway, so if it’s white-screening over there, that’s something we’d need more information from them (PayPal) about.
Whenever there is a payment error (declined card, etc) GiveWP displays an error on the front end to the donor, and logs an error in the logs at Donations > Tools > Logs > Payment Errors.
What errors are you seeing when you click on an individual error log entry there?
If I can get a place where the problem is replicable (bonus points for a spot where it’s replicable without using real money) I am happy to keep digging in!