Give Core version 1.6 is out now and includes some pretty significant improvements including RTL support, Goals improvements, Email Previews, and more. Let’s jump straight in.
Watch or Read
Here’s a quick screencast of the highlights. It doesn’t cover everything (read the rest below) but some features are nicer to see live than just read about.
Donation Email Previews
We’ve always had a Donation Receipt preview option, but until now it simply showed generic text for any of the email tags that are typically generated on the fly. Wouldn’t it be nice to preview your donation email receipts with actual data from a recent donation? Now you can. See it here:
Goals Improvements
We made two improvements to Goals.
Human Readable Goals
Let’s say you’re doing a really big fundraiser and you want to show your goal progress. Before this release putting large numbers both as the goal and the progress made really resulted in a long mess of numbers that wasn’t too pretty.
In version 1.6 we’ve implemented what’s called “Human readable” goal amounts. Rather than all those numbers, we spell it out like this:
So much nicer!
Of course, we know that many, many of our users aren’t doing campaigns this large. But you should know that Give can scale with your organization. When you’re ready to raise large sums, we’re ready with you.
Goals Template
Did you know that you can customize the markup of most of our shortcodes just like you customize page templates in a child theme? You can! Now you can do the same with the goals shortcode. Just go into /wp-content/plugins/give/templates/ and copy the file called “shortcode-goal.php” and put it in a “give” sub-folder in your child theme like this: /wp-content/themes/your-theme/give/shortcode-goal.php
Now you can customize that file as much as you like and when you use the give-goal shortcode your changes will be reflected.
More Internationalization
Give is getting a larger and more international user-base every day. Just look at the percentage of localized languages Give has been translated in to date:
RTL Support
If you notice, one of the languages with the highest amount of translation is Hebrew, which is read from right to left, instead of left to right. When you install WordPress in Hebrew your entire Admin experience goes from right to left (as it should). So when a plugin is used that doesn’t account for RTL languages, but the site is loaded with RTL, the user experience can be very jarring.
Version 1.6 changes that. Here’s our settings page in Hebrew now:
You can see that the Hebrew translation still needs to update our input descriptions, but other than that this is a major improvement for anyone using WordPress with RTL.
i18n improvements
Further, in order for any other language to properly translate all the Give strings, it’s important that each string be formatted correctly to make the translation process as easy as possible. We’ve been doing that since day one, but there are quite a bit of nuances to getting it just right. With the help of a new contributor (see below) version 1.6 is a significant improvement on our ability to support localized translations.
Developer Goodness
We’re developers and we love it when plugins add in easy ways to do more with their code base. We’ve got a lot of new developer tricks coming soon, but in this release in particular there’s two things we want to highlight:
Conditional Functions
We’ve added some handy conditional functions that work just like WordPress Core conditionals do.
- is_give_form() — returns true if you’re on a single Give page.
- is_give_category() — returns true if you’re on a category page.
- is_give_tag() — returns true if you’re on a Give tag page.
- is_give_taxonomy() — returns true if you’re on any Give taxonomy page.
We created a full doc with examples for each function.
PHP Doc Block improvements
With the help of our new colleague Ravinder Kumar (see below for more on Ravinder) we’ve gone through our code base and added detailed PHP Doc blocks. If you’re familiar with Doc Blocks then you know they are an excellent way to document your code, and there there are many tools available to help automate detailed documentation. So, hint, hint… watch for develop.givewp.com in the near future.
Featured Contributors
Over the next weeks you’ll see a lot more updates from us with our Give Add-ons and our WordImpress plugins as well. This is largely because of the additional muscle-power we’ve gotten from working closely with two new contributors that we’re excited to introduce you to. As we continue to grow as a company, we invest back into Give directly. We aren’t using our success for big vacations or fancy cars. Your support of Give and our Add-ons gets invested back into the platform itself so you continue to see improvements and have a stronger and more reliable donation solution. Hiring new developers is one of the best ways we can do that.
Ravinder Kumar
We recently hired Ravinder as a new WordPress Engineer, adding more development power to our team. He contributed greatly to many of the bug fixes in this release, as well as the PHP Doc Blocs. His help enables our Lead Developer, Devin Walker, to be able to work on our Add-ons and spend more time in his leadership role of guiding our business.
Ravinder has already proven himself to be a great problem-solver who’s detailed and diligent in his work ethic. We’re looking forward to building this plugin out more and more with his workmanship.
Rami Yushuvaev
Those deeply embedded in the WordPress community will know Rami as the founder of GenerateWP. He’s also a WordPress Core contributor, and the lead editor for the Hebrew language on wordpress.org. Rami approached us to work together on improving Give’s internationalization, RTL support, and accessibility. He’s expertise in these areas were invaluable for this release.
We look forward to a lot more contributions from Rami in the future.
The Changelog
= 1.6: =
* New: Added email tag support to Offline Donation Admin Notification - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/846
* New: Added a "Reset Password" option to the donation form if the user is prompted to login - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/723
* New: Add the ability for admins to switch a transaction to a different form - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/429
* New: Setting to adjust the number of decimal spaces. Give now support zero and three decimal currencies. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/738
* New: Human readable large monetary goal formats. For instance, if you have a goal of $2 million it will not display as "2,000,000" but rather "2 million". - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/650
* New: Address Give's right-to-left issues with a complete audit & resolution - thanks @ramiy! - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/736
* New: New template added for Give goals. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/411
* New: Easier and more understandable strings according for translators. - thanks @ramiy! - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/451
* New: Added a new filter "give_pdf_export_logo" to easily customize the export logo. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/802
* New: Customer meta class added for updating and saving donor data for non-users outside usermeta. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/653
* New: Conditional functions introduced is_give_form(), is_give_category(), is_give_tag(), and is_give_taxonomy() - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/832
* New: Donation receipt email previews now allow you to view actual payment data and switch between transactions. Add-on specific email tags will render when actual data is previewed. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/274
* New: Consolidated the number of columns within the transaction details screen. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/814
* Tweak: Update the country dropdown to use the new ISO country codes for islands in Dutch West Indies. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/698
* Tweak: Updated to the latest version of CMB2 & tested compatibility. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/670
* Tweak: Remove invalid @description from PHP inline doc blocks. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/733
* Tweak: Incorporate proper sanitization for i18n strings. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/471
* Tweak: Accessibility page headings added to screens in wp-admin. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/820
* Tweak: Unify wp_die() throughout codebase and add title and HTML status response codes. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/828
* Fix: Transaction list and donor donation list design break on tablet and mobile. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/813
* Fix: Unrendered html in multi-level donation confirmation emails. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/754
* Fix: Text editor does not have same height for visual mode and text mode. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/688
* Fix: Auto populate state list is not working on transaction detail page. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/715
* Fix: Unable to view payment history for donors with unusual characters in the email. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/717
* Fix: Mixed content warning with single donation form thumbnail placeholder image. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/768
* Fix: Secure SSL padlock icon and style no longer broken. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/769
* Fix: Categories and tags are registering permissions incorrectly upon install. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/725
* Fix: Amount field not formatting on focus out & lingering validation tooltip issues. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/778
* Fix: Auto populate the correct donation level when user adds a matching custom amount. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/730
* Fix: The "Export Donation History" csv no longer had the "Form Title" column and contained unnecessary columns. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/757
* Fix: A CSS conflict appeared with some themes when users view the donation receipt in browser and admins preview emails in wp-admin. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/818
* Fix: Prevent editor shortcode generator from displaying for users who don't have access to Give donation form editing. - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/845About the Author
