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How We Improved Our Easy Digital Downloads Integration

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Version 1.1.0 of Easy Digital Downloads Connect comes out today, with a few key bug fixes and some new features. If you use it, read on to find out what’s new.

How our Easy Digital Downloads integration works

Before I go into what’s new in this release, it’s worth taking a step back to understand how EDD Connect actually works.

With EDD Connect running, every donation to your Charitable campaigns is made through EDD’s checkout process. Under the hood, Charitable automatically creates a corresponding donation record for every payment in Easy Digital Downloads that includes a donation.

Besides being able to make regular donations to your campaigns, you can also create contribution rules. This way, you can automatically generate a donation to a Charitable campaign when someone purchases a download on your site.

For example, you might create a contribution rule that says that for every purchase of Product X in the month of March, 100% of that purchase is contributed to your fundraising campaign. Watch this video to see this in action.

The new donation syncing tool, and why it was needed

Late last week, we discovered a critical bug that resulted in Charitable creating incorrect donations for certain payments. This only affected payments where multiple variations of the same product were purchased.

Returning to our example, if somebody purchased variations 1 and 3 of Product X, both of which cost $10, only one of those variations was included when generating the donation. The resulting donation would be for $10 — instead of the $20 it should have been.

Version 1.1.0 fixes that bug. We also added a new syncing tool that will allow you to correct any donations that were created incorrectly.

The resync tool in Charitable Easy Digital Downloads ConnectEven if you aren’t affected by this bug, the ability to re-sync a donation could be useful for you in certain circumstances. Here are a couple ways you might use it:

  • If you add or remove downloads from a particular payment, you can sync the donation to make sure it is updated.
  • If you made a mistake in your contribution rule, you can update the contribution rule and then re-sync any affected donations.

Since most people won’t need this tool, we have left it disabled by default. If you would like to start using it, go to Charitable Settings Extensions and enable it. After doing that, you can sync individual donations on their details page, or bulk update donations via the main donations page at Charitable Donations.

Providing greater clarity about the source of a donation

We have also made it much easier to see how a donation is connected to its corresponding payment.

A screenshot showing a donation details page in Charitable, with line items showing how they connect to the Easy Digital Downloads payment.

Every line item that came from a download purchase now shows which download it came from. We also added a link in the donation details to the payment record, to make it easier to compare the two.

We also extended this to the Campaign Purchases export which is available from Downloads > Reports > Export. This report now provides a finer-grained view of each campaign donation and how it relates to the Easy Digital Downloads payment, including the quantity, price and variation of the item purchased.

There is one caveat with these improvements: It will only affect new donations, as older donations weren’t stored with the level of detail needed. But if you’d like your old donations to also show this level of detail, there’s an easy fix: use the re-sync tool!


If you have any questions about how this update affects you, please feel free to leave your comments/questions here or get in touch via our support form.

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