Seamless Donations

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Seamless Donations FAQ

General Questions

Why are donors sometimes indexed in search engines?

Donors, donations, and funds are all standard WordPress custom post types. These custom post types create web pages that can be indexed on the Web. Prior to Seamless Donations 5.0, donor records were created with default settings, which would allow them to be indexed. Seamless Donations 5.0 introduced the ability for donors, donations, and funds to be listed as Public, Private, or Password Protected. It also allowed donor, donation, and funds pages to be unpublished, if desired.

If you wish to hide donors and you’re running 5.0 or above, you can do so by visiting the donor custom post type in Seamless Donations and list it as unpublished. At the server level, you can also modify your .htaccess file to hide any items with /donor/ in the file path. Finally, you can also use My Private Site with the Public Pages add-on, but you’d have to go through and explicitly specify the directories you’d want to be visible to the outside world.

How does my donor end a repeating donation?

Repeating payments are controlled directly in the donor’s PayPal or Stripe account. Once they log into their account, they can terminate payments. PayPal and Stripe will also provide support if there are any concerns. 

How can I stop the sandbox warning after I switch to live mode?

This could be a result of page caching. Try flushing your browser cache and turn off caching on your site, and see if that helps.

Are there any special security considerations with this plugin?

PayPal and Stripe require your site to be secured with SSL (that would make your URL begin with https://) and be TLS 1.2 compatible. Beyond that, it never hurts to add a layer of security to your site, but your website doesn’t get banking or credit card information. PayPal and Stripe handle all of that.

However, you are still getting some personally identifiable information, so you should make sure to update your site regularly, keep plugins up to date, and possibly use a security plugin like Wordfence, Securi, or iThemes Security. 

How can I find the plugin settings?

The Seamless Donations settings section should be in your Dashboard bar in the admin interface. If you don’t see it, there’s a chance you have a conflict with another plugin. Try disabling your other plugins and see if any conflict.

I have a question not answered here. Where can I get support?

Just open a ticket. All support tickets go directly to the developer.

Form Questions

What is the shortcode I need to insert on a page to see the donation form?

From 4.0 onward, it’s [seamless-donations]This shortcode takes no options or parameters to display the form.

The radio buttons and checkboxes vanished. What do I do?

Most likely, there’s some CSS somewhere that is accidentally selecting those controls and hiding them. You can check this out by using Chrome’s inspector (or the equivalent in other browsers) to look at the page code right where the buttons are supposed to be. If you see the form and input tags, then Seamless Donations is presenting the controls. Somewhere else in your CSS, something may be processing a display:none or other tag that’s accidentally grabbing onto your donation controls.

Another option is to go to the Seamless Donations Form Options tab and try a different form style.

How do I hide the occupation field?

Go to the Seamless Donations Form Options tab and set Donor Occupation Field to Don’t Show.

How do I customize the donate button?

You have a couple of options. If you want to customize the CSS completely, go to the Seamless Donations Form Options tab and set the Form Style to None. This will allow your theme’s CSS to customize all the attributes of the form.

Alternatively, you could choose Modern Style, which gives you a very nice rectangular button. If you want to customize even more, the Beautiful Donation Forms and Colorful Donation Forms packs have some wonderful styles you can use. 

 

How do I fix "This form is not secure. Autofill has been turned off” errors?

Please visit the Lab Note entitled “Tricks for fixing https and SSL problems on your site“. It has a great list of tricks and steps for resolving https and SSL issues.

PayPal Questions

Why doesn't PayPal confirm donations on my development machine?

If you’re using a localhost development machine (like I do) or a machine that can’t be reached by a normal URL, PayPal can’t send it’s response since it does that through the URL you pass it during the donation payment process.

You’ll need to set up a test machine that’s open to the Internet. Be sure to turn on Sandbox mode. Don’t feel bad. It took me quite a while to figure out this little gem, and it’s pretty obvious once you start thinking about it. Sigh.

What URL should I use for the IPN notification URL at PayPal?

The correct URL to use is displayed on your settings page under PayPal Settings. This URL changed with the advent of Seamless Donations 5.1, so make sure you update your IPN at PayPal.

Do I need to set my IPN notification URL at PayPal?

In general it is not needed, but some users have needed to set it to get transactions to properly round-trip to and from PayPal and to have donations recorded correctly in Seamless Donations.

Stripe Questions

My Stripe API keys have been compromised. How can I reset them?

Log into your Stripe account and follow the instructions on this page. Scroll down and read the keeping keys safe and rolling keys sections.

WordPress-related Questions

How do I stop automatic plugin updates?

WordPress now offers automatic plugin updates. You can enable or disable this feature on the dashboard’s Plugins page, to the right of each named plugin.

How do I resolve email sending problems?

Because every WordPress hosting environment is different, the built-in WordPress email capability often is somewhat unreliable.

There are plugins that use external mailing engines and substantially improve mailing reliability. Visit the Seamless Donations Plugins and Extensions page for some great, free email-helper plugins: .

There’s also a great video tutorial on solving this problem by WPBeginner. 

How do I switch languages?

Go to the WordPress dashboard’s Settings > General section and change Site Language.

How do I change the time zone?

The timestamps on the donations and in the log are based on your blog’s timezone setting in the WordPress dashboard’s Settings > General section.

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