Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot

Description

The SponsorMe plugin lets you organise your fund raising on your WordPress blog. It shows a graph of your target and how much money you have collected. It also lets users pledge an amount to you and sends them to PayPal to collect money directly from them.

Screenshots

Installation

1. Download the plugin file, unzip and place it in your plugin folder.
This makes the plugin available to WordPress and it should now appear in your Plugin folder. The zip file contains all the files you need. Please make sure all files end up in the “SponsorMe” directory.

2. Activate the plugin
This “starts up” the plugin, making it available to your presentation files (you know, the ones that make up your theme). At this point, the plugin is active, but WordPress doesn’t know where it should be displaying SponsorMe or what you’re collecting funds for.

3a. Add this snippet to your theme: <?php SponsorMe_sidebar(); ?>
This tells WordPress where to put a small Sponsor Graph and link to your Sponsor page. Place the snippet in the sidebar where you want the graph to appear.

3b. Alternatively, the plugin is also widget-aware and will appear in your widget list.
Go to your widget screen and drag the SponsorMe widget to the place you want it to appear on your sidebar.

4. Create a new page with some information about your sponsorship campaign. Add this tag to your page: <!--SponsorMe-page-->.
This will be your sponsorship page. The special tag above tells the plugin where to put the main graph and display any sponsorship you have received to date. You’ll need to take note of the ID of this page

5. Configure the plugin
You now need to go to the administration menu for the plugin and give it a number of settings that will be used to generate the graphical representations. Specify the currency you want to sell in, your Paypal address, your target amount and the Page ID of the page you created in step 4. (p.s. the newer version now can automatically scan for this tag)

6. Wait for pledges to come in!
When a user pledges an amount, they will be taken straigh to PayPal to donate money. Once you receive the PayPal email to confirm the amount has been received, log into the plugin page and click “Verify” next to the payment you have received. This updates the graph and moves the payment to the confirmed list.

Usage

The plugin can be used in one of two ways:If you are using widgets, just drag the widget onto the area of the sidebar where you want it to appear.If you aren’s using widget, add the following code: <?php SponsorMe_Sidebar(); ?> to your template where you would like the graph to appear. You also need to create a special page for the your sponsorship and update the plugin settings with the appropriate values.

Download

Download here: sponsorme

History

v0.2: Initial public release. Let it loose on the world and see what feedback comes back ..
v0.3: Added external styling ability and improved colour handling
v0.4: Added handling capability for non-Paypal pledges
v0.5: Added UI for non-PayPal pledges. Users can now pledge cheque payments OR pay directly by PayPal (should this be optional?)
coming next: cooler graphs …

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on July 27th, 2008 at 12:24 am

I just wanted to thank you for an excellent plugin Owen! It is really working out nicely.

See it: http://www.sevhs.com/ways-to-help/make-a-donation/

A few things that didn’t quite fit my needs I had to adjust…

1. I disabled the viewing of the chart. Main reason is because I wanted to use it for general donations instead of going for a specific goal. They may have specific goals at times, which then I can uncomment those lines.

2. I would LOVE to be able to have multiple donation campaigns going. Mainly just for this particular site because they have several types of donations (general donations, memorial donations, specific donations like building funds, etc.).

3. Right now I am trying to figure out how to display the “recent donations” list in other areas of my theme. I haven’t really spent much time on it, but it would be neat to do.

Anyway — still such an excellent plugin and exactly what I was looking for to hopefully cut down on maintenance. Keep up the awesome work!

Rene

By: Rene Folsom
(1 comments)

on July 20th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

@Mark,

Thanks for the suggestions. I’m still putting some more things into the plugin, it’s far from baked yet, so I will be taking your suggestions on board. Playing with a funkier graph at the moment (Flash based) .. next version should be a bit prettier

By: Owen

on July 20th, 2008 at 9:52 am

Owen,

Good work!

I had to hack up sponsorme a bit for my purposes, but I just ran a test of it through PayPal’s sandbox system and my sandbox accounts register a payment submitted and a payment received.

Here are suggestions on upgrades.
*Enable a configuration entry to specify real live production PayPal or PayPal SandBox testing. Since we are working with money most administrators are probably going to want to perform a little more testing with this plugin, even though PayPal is the entity actually performing the transaction.

*While the public contribution tracking may be great for some purposes for others it is not, I would include a configuration option for administrators to turn it on/off per their need. I went through the code and found the relevant lines that display the public contribution reports and disabled those lines.

Cheers!

By: Mark Framness

on July 9th, 2008 at 6:54 am

[...] if you are using Wordpress there are a couple of donation plugins including Owen Cutajar’s Sponsor Me or the Gaboinked! Chipin Sidebar [...]

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