@livingstonewere i’ve been told your request was receivedfrom us (if you didn’t get a response in the next hour please check spam). I will close this ticket here so there is no confusion or cross communication. thank you!
@livingstonewere in our experience that error message is a common false positive. But I can understand not wanting to delete any plugin – if you are unable to do the suggested steps via FTP (not via Cpanel) as provided – as I mentioned you are free to reach out to us. We would be more than happy to help.
@livingstonewere The “license” message is a Charitable bug – one that has been confirmed to be resolved by users with version 1.7.0.6+. Since you have 1.7.0.4, we assume this is the same issue.
In terms of manually updating the plugin with the zip – these steps for a one-time manual update have worked as a solution for all users who did report the problem months ago. We haven’t encountered your new “download failed. a valid url was not provided” issue before – THIS error IS produced by WordPress itself and although the cause can vary it CAN be associated with unlegit URLs and/or hosting security settings (since you are uploading the zip file and not from Charitable, we are assuming the settings). Our support team would be curious to see if you got the “download failed, valid url not provided” error if you attempted to add or override ANOTHER WordPress plugin via zip.
You can also overwrite the Charitable version 1.7.0.4 (your current version) with the latest 1.7.0.11 via FTP. Here is a blog post explaining the process. If you reach out to us via our support site to securely share access credentials we would be happy to freely and quickly do this for you.
@livingstonewere The error you are reporting is one produced by WordPress and not Charitable… it’s somewhat not encountered often and is usually related to permissions or some sort of setting on your install.
Our team recommends turning on WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG and then examining debug.log to see if there are more details provided in that file after another attempt. You can learn more about WordPress debugging here.
Once logged is turned on see if you can repeat the same steps… then repeat the steps but this time deactivating Charitable first, repeating the steps after switching to a default WordPress theme, and then as a next step repeating the same steps with ANY WordPress plugin zip file.. If you encounter the same error after doing these steps would be to reach out to your hosting company to confirm if they have any special setup or items defined that might be effecting your WordPress site.
@livingstonewere Thanks for that information! A few months back when that version was released soon afterwards our team observed the same issue and released a fix in 1.7.0.6. You can see that in the notes for that version in the changelings here for 1.7.0.6:
At the top of the plugin page on your WordPress site, click “Add New”.
On the next page click “Upload Plugin” and “Choose File” and select the zip file you had just downloaded.
If your current version of Charitable is still active while you do this you’ll likely be shown the version differences between the currently installed version and the version you are uploading.
Install and/or activate and replace current with uploaded.
If you are running third-party code snippets or plugins that might be adding functionality to Charitable that these must be properly checking for Charitable or else during ANY upgrade you might experience issues. If you think this is the case, you might want to disable the code or plugins first and refer to our code snippet code standards post here: wpcharitable.com/code-snippet-best-practices/ In any case, it’s always wise to make sure you have a recent backup.
Hope this helps! Let us know if you have any questions.
@nwdco Thank you for these responses and sharing the list of plugins.
So just to review again: Charitable nor any of it’s official addons add a Pan Number to the donation form. If you had it in the donation form it had to have been added by a third party plugin or a code snippet (likely in your theme functions.php or via a plugin).
By what you’ve told us it sounds like at the same time you updated Charitable core it “broke” that code snippet – thereby removing the custom field ability to hook into Charitable, thus losing the entire column in exports. Since Charitable core does NOT add that field it’s important to know how or where this code that added this field came from in order to troubleshoot this more effectively. The code we would be looking for might be very similar to the code we provided to you earlier which made the Pan Number field appear in your donation form.
That being said, these are suggestions our team has (in order of what you should try).
Ask any previous developers (it looks like you are using a custom built theme called “rotibank” – which matches your domain name – so likely you had developers involved with the site?) if they added code to add the PAN Number to the donation field and how/where it might be. Do a search of your theme (especially functions.php) and any custom theme specific plugins for code as well.
Another possibility is to reach out to the developers of the Instamojo Payment Gateway plugin since they might have added this or worked with PAN Numbers.
You can try downgrading to 1.7.0.10 to see if the Pan Numbers reappear. If you reach out to us via our support site, we would be happy to email you a safe secure link to download that version.
It is possible that if a developer added snippet code to add a pan number to the donation form DIRECTLY into Charitable itself then upgrading to 1.7.0.11 would wipe that custom code and it would be lost. Although rare, this can happen… the only way to confirm this would be to restore a backup of the site or perhaps just the plugin previous to when you upgraded to 1.7.0.11.
See if you can confirm Pan Numbers are still with previous donations (you can view a past donation in Charitable and see if the Pan Number is listed on the side info area, as shown in the screenshot at the end of this message).
Finally you can attempt to confirm if the pan numbers from previous donations are still in the database.You would need to access the mysql database of your WordPress install (most commonly via phpmyadmin via your hosting company). In the wp_postmeta database table locate a row with a post_id of a donation (example: “123”) AND the meta_key of “donor”. The meta_value will contain a serialized array of the values of the donation and you should see “Pan Number” included in this array. If you do see this that assumes the Pan Numbers were stored via a proper code snippet and still remain in the database, and we would just need to determine how to export them out again. If they are not there, then whatever snippet or method used to add Pan Numbers might not have been coded properly.
Based on the information we have, these are the suggestions our team can think of to help troubleshoot this further. Again, the key is knowing how the Pan Number was integrated to your website before since Charitable doesn’t add this by default. Hope the above helps!
Can you describe more about what version you currently have, and what version you are updating to? When you are noting a crash can you provide any additional information – such as what appears on the screen or in your error logs (if you are not showing error logs on the screen that you can share with us, we would recommend turning on WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG and reproduce the issue to share with his what is happening in your logs: https://ww.wp.xz.cn/documentation/article/debugging-in-wordpress/)
Very commonly when users attempt to update and there is an error is a result of a third-party plugin or code snippet not properly checking to see if Charitable is activated (it’s not activated for a brief moment as you update). Not saying it’s the case here but it’s worth checking out. In order to test this you would need to (1) switch to a default WordPress theme for a moment and (2) deactivate any code snippet plugins – or all non-Charitable plugins. Try to manually update Charitable again via the upload option in WordPress. See if you get a different result.
Either way we do want to help you update, so please share with us additional information (or if you submitted a support ticket through our website let us know so we can locate that quickly) and we would happy to help you resolve this. Thanks!
@nwdco thanks for this response. to make sure we are reading your information correctly is the following correct:
You upgraded from 1.7.0.10 to 1.7.0.11 and on the same day experienced issues.
Previously you saw PAN Number export in your column but now there is NO PAN NUMBER COLUMN at all (this is important – if the pan number column is still there but there are no Pan Numbers, please let us know)
You never had a “pan number” field on your Charitable donation form on your website (only recently when you used our code but before that you didn’t)
We are asking to confirm the above because some of this information was in the questions we asked previously but some of the responses weren’t clear for us to determine.
If you never had a Pan Number in the donation field at https://rotibankfoundation.org/donations/, the only other place it could have come from would be a third-party code or plugin, perhaps taking a number entered from the gateway and passing it along to Charitable. I notice you use Instamojo as a Payment Gateway. Charitable does not support this gateway in any of our official plugins… but we notice that another third-party plugin does on ww.wp.xz.cn: Instamojo Payment Gateway. Are you using this plugin? Can you provide us a list of active, inactive plugins and your WordPress theme (you can easily copy a list from your Site health screen at /wp-admin/site-health.php?tab=debug).
The upgrade from 1.7.0.10 to 1.7.0.11 in Charitable was a small security release that should not have effected anything to do with custom fields or Pan numbers but since we do not support third party plugins we wanted to confirm if you were using the Instamojo Payment Gateway plugin or any similar non-official Charitable plugin.
@chris19866 Thanks for reaching out. Charitable does not have a captcha feature built in or anti spam built into the core plugin currently. If you are exclusively using the core plugin only, these suggestions have been helpful to those in the past:
Create a custom page for your donation page using the donation form shortcode. In the past this has worked against bots finding the default Charitable page.
Inform your hosting company that you are experiencing bot attack and ask them to look at traffic logs and potentially suspicious IPs (IP addresses might be recorded as well in the donation details in Charitable depending on what version of Charitable you are using).
Asking users to register and login to donate is highly effective and there are several WordPress plugins that make this easy.
Add a custom field to your form and make it required – his should prevent the form from being submitted in some scenarios and has been effective for some in the past.
Finally adding a CAPTCHA to the donation page is technically possible but would require a developer and is outside the scope of the support we are able to provide here. Some WordPress plugins might be able to help here.
@nwdco Thanks for the response. Without knowing how the pan numbers were incorporated into your site (because Charitable doesn’t have that by default – and your form seems to submit to a third party site/page for payment) it’s difficult to troubleshoot. Updating Charitable itself should not have effected this, especially if the pan number was added as a custom field to the donation form like in the script we shared with you.
Can you please clarify “neither is shown on the donation form page” – the script I gave you should have solved this (and it seemed like you said it worked) so maybe we are talking about different forms. Feel free to share a screenshot of where the Pan Number was and if our script did actually add it back exactly where it was.
Please also double check your site to make sure any plugin, snippets, etc. aren’t turned off in case you or your developer were using this to add the pan number in the first place.
And just for support reasons let us know what version of Charitable you updated from and what version you have now.
Please also test with our script with a test donation to see if the pan number comes through (and in the export if there is a empty column or no column for pan at all).
Thanks!
This reply was modified 3 years ago by WPCharitable.
