Announcing Give Version 1.8

Give 1.8 has a lot of great code improvements and we are particularly excited about our new Form Edit UI, Admin UI, Button Only mode and more new features.
Announcing Give Version 1.8

Give Version 1.8 has been in development for more than two months. Today, we’re excited to announce its arrival in all your websites.

Give 1.8 has a lot of great code improvements for stability and reliability. But we are particularly excited about our new Form Edit UI, Admin UI, Button Only mode and more new features.

Major update to Form Edit UI

As a Give user, you probably know how Give — out of the box — has several “metaboxes” that you have to navigate through in order to configure your form. If you have other plugins that also add metaboxes, then your Give form page can get really unwieldy.

Not any more! The animation below is a preview of our new Give Form Edit Screen. It’s fast, consistent, easy to navigate and very easy on the eyes. Each panel has a link to our dedicated documentation article specifically on that settings panel.

Developers might like to know that we previously were using CMB2 in our plugin. We love CMB2 and still use it in many of our free plugins, but doing a UI like this was more than CMB2 really is designed for. But we built our new Settings API with backward compatibility with CMB2 in mind. You can create new panels and metaboxes and settings in a very similar way.

If you are a Give Add-on Developer (or want to be), check out our “Give Settings API Example” plugin to see exactly how you can extend our form edit screen.

The new Give 1.8 Form Edit Screen
The new Give 1.8 Form Edit Screen

Admin Settings UI Update

Similarly, we’ve revamped the way we do our Admin settings pages and sub-panels. If you are VERY familiar with our Give Settings then you might notice we moved a few things around. If you aren’t, then we believe you’ll find the navigation very intuitive.

We also spent quite a bit of time looking at how we labeled settings and what options they provided. Previously, we often relied on a checkbox but the label sometimes made checking the checkbox mean to enable something, and other times to disable it. That was a bit confusing. Now each setting is labeled clearly for what it does and how to enable/disable it without confusion.

The New Give 1.8 Admin Settings UI
The New Give 1.8 Admin Settings UI

Button Mode!

One of the things that our users immediately enjoyed about Give from launch day was our modal popup display method. It is a popular feature, so much so that many users wanted it everywhere throughout their site. But the modal method shows the amount above the button before opening the modal. What if you want a button in the header or footer of your site that opens the whole donation form?

We actually wrote an article about how you could still do that with Give with just a little custom code (we like providing little snippets like these for users to use Give however they want). But didn’t it make much more sense to just include that as a feature in the Core plugin?

Introducing Button mode! See it in action here:

[give_form id=”584″ show_title=”false” show_goal=”false” show_content=”none” display_style=”button”]

This is a simple feature that you can use now to launch your general giving form from anywhere on your site with one click.

Development on Versions 1.9 and 2.0 is Already Underway

We’ve also been focusing on being more strategic in rolling out new features and improvements in future milestones. So we already have some pretty big milestones coming for the next versions of Give, which you’ll see rolling out in 2017. Here’s just a quick preview:

Give 1.9

  • Revamping our Forms API — this will make manipulating the layout and positioning of all our form fields, legends, inputs, and triggers much easier from a development perspective.
  • Email creation updates — we want to make it easier for you to customize all your emails both programmatically and eventually with a UI as well. This is the beginning of that.

Give 2.0

  • Payment Meta and Database Improvements — we want to make major improvements to the way donation information is stored and retrieved. This will help make getting that information and presenting it both in Reports, Exports, and migrating across sites much easier, let alone helping developers a lot as well.

As always, if your organization is using Give and you have a vested interest in its development, we encourage you to track our Give issues on Github, comment on the things that are most important to you, and even submit a pull request if you have the desire and skill. Give fully embraces the Open Source philosophy and we welcome your contributions.

Full Changelog

 

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