We released Give version 1.3 yesterday. In terms of features and fixes, it was our most significant release since launching this past April. Here’s the major highlights.
Floating Labels
We really believe in “best practices” when it comes to online donation forms. And one central tenant of best practices for online giving is to keep your forms as clean and simple as possible. Give was built that way from the very beginning, but we believe “Floating Labels” are a great feature that can clean up your forms even more.
Floating Labels are intended to do several things all at once:
- Give your form fields a cleaner look by removing the labels from outside the fields themselves
- But for accessibility keep Placeholder text inside the fields
- And when you click inside the field the Placeholder moves up so you don’t lose the context of the field you are inputting your text into.
The main benefits of floated labels is a much cleaner interface while still keeping your forms accessible to all types of readers. Even though we believe it’s a really nice improvement, it’s not for everyone. We like to keep our “options” down to a minimum, but in this case we thought it best to give you the choice — per form — of whether to use Floating Labels or not. For example, you might want to keep the labels above your fields on your main donation form. But if you post a simple form in your sidebar, the floated labels will help that form fit much more cleanly in the smaller area.
As the saying goes “Simple isn’t Easy”. We’ll continue to iterate on our form to make them cleaner and more intuitive for your donors to give as quickly as possible.
New Shortcode Generator
Until now, the Give form shortcode was an all or nothing. You put it on the post/page and you get the whole enchillada. In version 1.3, you can now choose which shortcode to insert on the page, and then customize that shortcode in the lightbox directly before inserting it to the editor.
Choose which of ALL the Give shortcodes to insert
Configure new shortcode attributes
New Give Goal Shortcode
You might have noticed in the above screenshot that we’ve added a new shortcode to our family! You can now post just the Goal of any form anywhere you want on your site with the Give Goal shortcode. We have documentation on that here.
One thing to keep in mind: Often, users want to use shortcodes in their sidebars. That’s a perfect use-case for Give Goals. Shortcodes are not enabled in Text Widgets by default. Sometimes your theme might enable that, but it’s not often the case. If you find that your Give shortcodes don’t work in your Text widget, add this snippet:
add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');
If you need help knowing where to add that, read our resource on adding custom PHP snippets to your WordPress site here.
Shoutout to Paul Ryley
You might remember in version 1.2 we gave a shout out to @pryley. At that time, he came out of nowhere and contributed some great things. We didn’t even know his name or what he did at that time. Since then, we’ve gotten to know Paul a bit better and he contributed A LOT to this release. Floating labels? That’s his JS library. Shortcode generator? He contributed that. It’s a testimony to the power of Open Source software when you see people of good will working together to solve problems and help make the web a better place.
Here’s to Building the Web, Paul! Thanks for all you do!
All the Changes
Since launch, we discovered a few edge-case bugs. Thanks to all of you on the WordPress Support Forum who updated quickly and reported your issue with candor and patience. We really appreciated that, and responded by getting those hotfixes out same day. Another testimony to Open Source and generous collaboration that we’re really proud of.
Here’s ALL THE THINGS that went into this release:
= 1.3.0.3 = * New: Form Content display option added to new shortcode builder https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/pull/298 * Fix: Form Content not showing on Single Forms https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/294 = 1.3.0.2 = * Fix: Removed bracket array declarations usage that only works with PHP 5.4+ - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/290 * Fix: PHP 5.2 Issue with anonymous function / Closure used in new shortcode generator - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/291 * Fix: wp_mail function conflict with Mandrill and the new shortcode generator due to too early initialization https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/289 = 1.3.0.1 = * Fix: Provided fallback function for array_column function used that's only in PHP 5.5+ - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/288 * Fix: Removed Bower folder from WordPress.org plugin repo as it shouldn't be there = 1.3 = * Special shout out to a rock star contributor @pryley https://github.com/pryley - v1.3 wouldn't be packed full with all these awesome enhancements without him! * New: Floating labels functionality! Enable floating labels to provide a cleaner donation interface for your users. Thanks @pryley - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/pull/231 * New: Shortcode generator for easily adding the various Give shortcodes to your pages and posts. Special thanks to @pryley for all his hard work on this! https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/pull/275 * New: Goal shortcode added to Core so you can now show various donation form goals separately from donation forms - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/184 * New: Global setting to disable single give forms sidebars added - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/192 * New: 'give_forms_single_summary_classes' filter added for customizing form wrapper classes * New: Advanced global setting added for load scripts in the footer - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/209 * New: Admin - Refresh Reports button added to ensure user can clear transients used to store reporting data - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/210 and https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/85 * New: Basic table styles for Give tables - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/232 * New: Custom amount field displays numbers by default on mobile/tablet - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/233 * New: Bower implemented to manage third-party JS scripts - Thanks @pryley https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/pull/236 * New: Swedish translation files added - Thanks @mepmepmep https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/238 * New: Changed the ajax loader text from "Updating Price" to "Updating Amount" - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/269 * Fix: Modal close button now displays properly - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/228 * Fix: [give_login] shortcode now working as expected - also fixed up the logic to output the new [give_goal] shortcode see - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/279 * Fix: Admin Give menu section called "Donation Forms" rather than just "Forms" thanks @pryley - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/196 * Fix: Include CMB2CSS in the head to avoid FOUC https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/243 * Fix: Test Mode Active notification displays for editors when inactive https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/242 * Fix: Delete invalid licenses and when a valid license is entered the field is now a password type https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/203 * Fix: When Only a Payment Gateway without CC Fields is Active Fatal JS error https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/253 * Fix: Multiple Give Forms on Single Page Causes CC Validation to Fail https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/254 * Fix: Donation form income totals not properly updated when manually updating amounts or deleting transactions causing goals to not calculate correctly - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/188 * Fix: Admin Column: If no goal is set for a donation form show "No Goal Set" rather than "0.00" - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/256 * Fix: Norwegian Kroner currency symbol adjustments - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/256 * Fix: Salient theme wrapper divs added - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/280 * Fix: Broken welcome screen content columns - https://github.com/WordImpress/Give/issues/287
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