Update: The beta is out. Here’s where you can download it. Here are the release notes.
It’s been quite a while since Seamless Donations has had an update. While hurricanes and hospitalizations may have gotten in the way of new coding, we will not let a global pandemic stand in our way! Coding must go on!
Get to the point. What’s this new release?
Seamless Donations 5.0 is a complete rewrite of the entire admin section of the plugin. When I adopted Seamless Donations and built the 4.x release, I used a library for creating the admin UI. Unfortunately, that library has been very difficult to work with, which impacted my ability to add, change, or improve many of Seamless Donations features.
Last November, I finally decided to bite the bullet and begin work on this new release. Since then, I’ve been working on principle coding, reimplementing all the features of 4.0 in 5.0. While most of the functionality of this release is internal, there are three outward feature changes you may appreciate.
- Enabled the ability for donors, donations, and funds to be listed as Public, Private, or Password Protected. Also allowed donor, donation, and funds pages to be unpublished, if desired.
- Enabled the permalink on the donor, donation, and fund detail pages for easy preview of the donor, donation, and fund pages.
- Added helpful link to the IPN entry location in PayPal (on Settings tab).
Fine. What do I need to know?
There are three key items you need to be aware of. First, this release is making a ton of changes, so I’m going to ask for as many folks as possible to beta test. That request is probably a few days to about a week away. I just wanted you to know ahead of time so you can prepare for it.
Second, if you don’t have a backup strategy in place for your site, now is the time to make it happen. You will want to backup your site before you install the beta. Make sure you’re making regular backups.
Third, while beta testing is going on, I’m going to attempt to implement Stripe as a payment gateway. I haven’t yet tried adding a new gateway to Seamless Donations (and the code is not built for multiple gateways), but I’m hoping that I can get Stripe up and running. If I do, it will be free with a subsequent update of Seamless Donations.
What framework are you using?
I’m switching from Admin Page Framework to CMB2. So far, I’ve been pretty impressed with its functionality. I’ve also re-written all of the widget code from scratch using the basic WordPress widget API.
Thanks everyone!
The beta isn’t available yet, but it will be shortly. When it is, I’ll let you know. Please, PLEASE, please download it and test.
Hang in there folks. I hope you’re all doing well in this crazy pandemic time.
–David
