With the holidays and WordCamp US right around the corner, we still are planning to release Give 1.7 in the first week of December. Here’s what that means for you.
We’ve been writing posts about Give 1.7 recently to show you some of the great features and improvements it has in store. With it’s development wrapping up we can say now that we will release it right around the same time WordPress 4.7 will be released. That should give you plenty of time to prepare for properly updating your WordPress site.
Along with Give CLI, Custom Alert Messages, and some Deprecated Hooks, Give 1.7 is adding
- A lot of fine-tuning around internationalization, PHPDocs, and accessibility
- Custom required field alerts
- A new receipt link URL email tag
- New Licensing fields with better validation
Fine Tuning
While we love rolling out a whole bunch of very visible and awesome features, the thing that keeps your donations rolling smoothly is mostly “under the hood.” We’re continually improving on our code base, making it better for use in all countries of the world, and those who view the web with assitive devices like screen readers. This makes your website better, stronger, and more reliable.
Custom required field alerts
Occasionally your donors get a little quick with the typing and don’t notice a required field. If they hit “donate” too early, Give uses instant native browser alerts so that the “Donate” button doesn’t activate — meaning no refresh of the page.
By default these kinds of alerts typically only say “Please fill out this field”. But with a donation form you want the donor to know exactly what is expected of them. Now the fields will say “Please provide your First Name.”
Of course, these can be customized via a filter like this:
add_filter('give_form_translation_js', 'my_first_name_alert');
function my_first_name_alert($array) {
$array['give_first'] = esc_html__( 'You forgot your name!', 'give' );
return $array;
}
Relevant Github: https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/351
New Receipt URL Email Tag
Currently, in your Donation Receipt Emails, you have the {donation_receipt} email tag which outputs a fully qualified linked text. But if you wanted to style that as a button you’d be stuck. For example, if you wanted to create heavily-customized donation email receipts (like in our tutorial) you wouldn’t be able to style that link at all.
Give 1.7 introduces the {donation_receipt_url} email tag that allows you to do just that.
Relevant Github Issue: https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/581
Improved Add-on License Validation
Give 1.7 introduces a much more robust tab for our Add-on customers to be able to see their Add-on Licenses, their active state, expiration date, and even handy links to renew your license with a click.
This is Just the Beginning
We have a lot more in store for Give after 1.7. Check out these Milestones:
Give 1.8
- Major overhaul to our Settings API — paving the way for much more flexibility for Add-ons
- Adding a Global Terms & Conditions option
- Button only mode — launch a Give form from one button.
Give 1.9
- Major update to the Donor UI
- Importable Sample Data — this makes testing Give much easier for users and developers alike. This might potentially be powered by the Give CLI from Give 1.7.
All of our activity on these issues and many, many more are all public for you to view and chime in on. We’re always appreciative of users commenting and contributing to Give via our Open Source repository.
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