Accept Direct Debit Donations with GoCardless: Plugin News (February)

We’re only a couple months into the year, but we have been busy with updates to Charitable, its extensions, and the launch of a brand new integration: GoCardless.

Highlights from the GoCardless plugin

GoCardless is a unique payment gateway with a focus on facilitating Direct Debit payments. It works seamlessly with a variety of Direct Debit schemes, including Bacs (UK), ACH (USA), SEPA (most of Europe), Autogiro (Sweden), Betalingsservice (Denmark), PAD (Canada), and BACS and BACS NZ (Australia and New Zealand).

Besides being a more familiar way for certain donors to contribute, one key benefit of Direct Debit is that it has dramatically lower transaction costs, which means less overhead for your non-profit.

Our GoCardless plugin has full support for Recurring Donations, Fee Relief and our other extensions.

Plugin updates in January & February

Besides the release of Charitable GoCardless, we also put out eight plugin updates.

Charitable 1.6.55 & 1.6.56

Charitable has received a pair of updates which implemented a few new features for developers, as well as bug fixes:

• The charitable_template_donation_form() function was added, allowing you to embed a donation form for a specific campaign in your template. It requires a campaign ID to be passed along as the first argument.
• There is a new charitable_currency filter, as well as a charitable_get_default_currency() function, which retrieves the unfiltered site currency. charitable_get_currency() now returns the filtered currency.
• Each donation now stores its currency. You can get the currency for a donation through the Donation Fields API:

charitable_get_donation( $donation_id )->get( 'currency' );

• Charitable has improved compatibility with block themes like Twenty Twenty Two by handling the way templates are loaded in those themes. In particular, there were problems on dynamically generated pages such as the Donation Receipt or Password Reset / Forgot pages.
• We fixed a bug where editing a donation in the admin could change its change date to January 1, 1970. This happened in situations where the person editing the donation had their profile language set to something other than English.
• In the donation receipt, the total donation amount now correctly includes any fees added through Fee Relief.

Braintree 1.0.3 & 1.0.4

• Our Braintree plugin faced a few unexpected hurdles with the release of WordPress 5.9, as scripts are loaded in a different way. These were resolved and Braintree works lovely now — including with block themes.
• We’ve avoided unnecessary overhead by skipping the registration of Braintree-specific donation fields unless Braintree is active as a gateway.
• We also fixed an issue preventing translations from working as expected for the Braintree plugin.

Recurring Donations 1.2.17 & 1.2.18

• We fixed a bug that resulted in the recurring donation total being formatted incorrectly in the donation receipt on sites where commas are used as the decimal separator.
• Like our Braintree plugin and Charitable itself, Recurring Donations needed a little fine-tuning to ensure full compatibility with block themes such as Twenty Twenty Two.
• We fixed a fatal error when a donation form is loaded in a modal while viewing a grid of campaigns.

Ambassadors 2.1.13

• Ambassadors also received an updated to handle compatibility with block themes and WordPress 5.9.

Fee Relief 1.1.9

• We fixed a bug preventing fees from being added correctly when using Stripe Checkout and a currency where commas are used as the decimal separator.

Mollie 1.0.3

• We fixed a bug preventing renewal donations from being recorded correctly, which could result in duplicates being created in Charitable.

Payrexx 1.0.1

• Got rid of an annoying nag to update to the latest version despite being on the latest version.

What’s coming next?

GoCardless is the first new plugin for 2022, but it won’t be the last. Our PDF Receipts extension is almost ready to be released (if you’d like to be part of the beta testing, get in touch), and we have a few other goodies planned which we’re keeping a little closer to home for now — including some significant updates to Charitable itself. Stay tuned. 😉