GiveWP and Add-ons should be updated

[JasonTheAdams]

GiveWP and its add-ons are currently quite a few versions behind. There have also been some reported issues with subscriptions being properly synched to Stripe. Being so many versions behind, there's a very good chance the issue has been since resolved.

Depending on any complications during the update process, this will either be relatively fast (~1 hour) or could take many hours to work through. In any case, this work should be done.

This has been approved. This Issue will be used to track progress.

[JasonTheAdams]

I did a test run of updating GiveWP locally and, happily, things went fairly smoothly. I tested out making a new Subscription from the sdrefugeetutoring.com/give form and everything worked nicely — I double-checked on Stripe to make sure it appeared there as well.

I was hoping to update the form to one of the new, better looking templates. Unfortunately, I actually found a bug in the new form that is going to prevent us from doing this. The good news is that I'm the Manager of Development at GiveWP so I'm going to prioritize a fix. 😉 To be clear, the form template we're currently using is perfectly fine.

I'm going to go ahead and update GiveWP on sdrefugeetutoring.com, and come back to updating the form templates another time. I will create a backup of the website at this exact point, so if there are any issues we can roll back. We'll want to keep a sharp eye for issues for a couple days.

[JasonTheAdams]

Alas, I started to run the updates on sdrefugeetutoring.com and ran into issues. That's unfortunate. I immediately rolled the site back to the backup I made right before doing the updates (proof backups are important). Apparently something is different on production than my local copy. My next step is going to be to create a staging site on WP Engine as a direct copy from production. I'll attempt the updates on staging and hope the same issues arise there so I can look into them further.

[JasonTheAdams]

I created a staging environment and was able to successfully update GiveWP and all of it's add-ons, so I'm going to make another attempt to do so on production.

There are two notable improvements I'd like to call out in the latest versions of GiveWP and its add-ons:

Donor Dashboard

Donors have a brand-new dashboard for viewing donation history, downloading annual receipts, and managing subscriptions — all in one place. It's lovely and works great.

Form Templates

There's a concept of "Form Templates" now which are beautiful form layouts that look amazing without hardly any effort. It's a great way to improve the donation experience in a few seconds.

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I'm the Manager of Development at GiveWP, so pardon if I'm a little proud of these improvements. Hahah! Regardless of my attachment to it, I felt it was worth sharing some very cool improvements coming to sdrefugeetutoring.com.

[JasonTheAdams]

I have completed the upgrades! Please let me know if any donors report any issues!