Your website has cool stuff and encourages people to donate for it, but nobody ever gives a penny? Give them something that they get only for a donation, e.g. a link on your website. A link is like a little ad space, the donor’s website will gain some popularity, and even (if you don’t use nofollow) some PR juice. And if the donation links are presented appealingly and at a prominent position, the motivation to donate will strongly rise. If you want to know how to go about it, read on. All you need is a PayPal account and a WordPress blog.

How to really get some donation bucks

Would you mind if somebody just gave you some money? Of course not. In fact, you deserve it! You have an informative website, you create free stuff, or you are just a nice guy. This is why you have a Donate button on your website.

But, honestly: Are you getting rich from donations? Certainly not. The reason is, people come by and think: “Why should I donate? I don’t have any actual disatvantages from not donating, while donating will loose me money.” In terms of sociology, it’s most people’s rational choice not do donate. Only people who value the advantages of donating (for example a good feeling) higher than a certain amount of money, will decide to donate.

A good idea is to offer people something in return. Of course, they already got your stuff (cool content or free software). But give them something only for the donation, and the motivation to donate will rise. A very good idea is to set a link to donors on your website. (Might seem obvious, but I myself had to be pointed to it – thx, Gobala.) Getting a link on your website is certainly a feature that motivates people to spend money.

However, a simple link list is rather boring … so we present:

The Donations Cloud – donating the 2.0 way!

The donations cloud is something like a tag cloud, only that it displays – donations. ;) The more a person donates, the larger the link to his/her website will be. (A special function ensures that small donations aren’t to tiny, and very big donations aren’t ridicioulusly large.) To see a “live” donations cloud, have a look at the sidbar of this page. ;)

 

Thank god, a WP plugin!

When you are raising funds, you want to get as many donations as possible. Unfortunately, the more donations you get, the more work you have managing the links. Also, it would be nice for the donors to see their link coming up instantly after the donation. Therefore, it is mandatory to have a system that manages payments automatically.

So, here’s the good news: Not only did we develop the ingenious concept of a donations cloud, but we also developed a WordPress plugin that will make the integration of your own donations cloud totally easy. And the best thing: This plugin which will make you so incredibly rich, is available for free — except from a little donation by you ;) .

A standalone (not WordPress-dependent) Donations Cloud solution will be available soon.

Download

Have problems unpacking archives? Try the latest 7zip.

Please donate, using the form on the upper right of this page! You will support our efforts and receive a backlink!

Installation

  • If you haven’t already, open a PayPal account (sorry, only PayPal at the moment).
  • If you haven’t already, get PayPal API credentials with a signature.
  • Download the plugin, unpack it, upload donationscloud to your plugins/ directory.
  • Edit the file settings.php to match your requirements.
  • If you use sidebar widgets, the plugin provides two widgets you can use: one for the form, one for the cloud.

  • If you don’t use widgets, edit your theme’s sidebar.php and insert two new sections that might look like:

    <?php if ( function_exists('dc_donation_form') ) echo '<li>'.dc_donation_form(false).'</li>'; ?>

    <?php if ( function_exists('dc_donations_cloud') ) echo '<li>'.dc_donations_cloud(false).'</li>'; ?>

    (You could also have the donations cloud on a dedicated page, if it’s very large.)

  • Edit the file popup.php to fit your website and your terms. If you have a non-english or multi-language website, you’ll also have to create popup-$locale.php files.
  • Finally, activate the plugin and lean back while getting rich! ;)

Integration hints

  • Make sure to place the donation form and the donations cloud at prominent positions. The more people people realize the form, the more will consider donating. The more prominent the cloud is, the higher is the motivation to get a link in this cloud.
  • If you are afraid that Google will punish you because of the lot of outgoing links, the plugin has an option in the settings to make the links rel="nofollow". If you choose to use this, please don’t forget to tell your potential donors. Note: I used to not use nofollow, but I realized that search engines punish the lot of links very hard. So, since recently, I use nofollow, too.

Have fun with the Donations Cloud plugin! If you like it, spread the word and donate!

79 comments on “The Donations Cloud”

  1. Suzie Cheel on May 3, 2008 at 08:06 #

    Just followed you instructions to the T, and no box is appearing- yes if it works I will donate for 2 blogs

    is there something I missed , thanks

    Suzie

  2. Alex Günsche on May 3, 2008 at 10:24 #

    You didn’t quite follow it to the T … ;) The tutorial says “edit your theme’s sidebar.php”, you instead created a sidebar widget with the mentioned code, which is why the code is printed literally in the HTML source. Sorry, the plugin is not widget-capable yet, so you actually have to modify the sidebar.php file with a text editor.

  3. Suzie Cheel on May 3, 2008 at 21:18 #

    Thanks Alex,

    I did actually edit the themes sidebar, ie I put this code into my right hand sidebar. php not into a widget
    Donate and get linked’.dc_donation_form(false).'’; ?>

    Recent donations’.dc_donations_cloud(false).'’; ?>

    By the tutorial do you mean the setting.php file?

    Thanks
    Suzie

  4. Suzie Cheel on May 4, 2008 at 00:15 #

    if I can’t sort it what donation woud you like to help me?

  5. Alex Günsche on May 4, 2008 at 01:55 #

    I see. Is it possible that you inserted the code &gt; instead of a literal > character (and vice versa with < )?

    A donation would be very much apprechiated … donate whatever you feel like my plugins are worth. ;)

  6. Alex Günsche on May 4, 2008 at 10:17 #

    Attention to all users of the plugin: There is a bug in the plugin which causes the verification of the Transaction ID to always fail. This is not particularily dangerous or evil, it’s just that the donation won’t be inserted automatically, but it has to be added manually. Everything else works fine. A fixed version will be available soon.

    False alarm: The bug was only in a slightly modified version for my own usage, the public version was not affected. Anyway, v0.1.1 is available now.

  7. Suzie Cheel on May 4, 2008 at 12:50 #

    checked everything not sure what to do next- think this plugin has so much value. Can i get you to help me install it?

    This is important to me now\

    thanks
    Suzie

  8. Alex Günsche on May 4, 2008 at 20:19 #

    Suzie, I do usually not provide indivdiual support on a “quick’n'dirty” basis, because there’s too much risk to mess up someone’s WP configuration/installation. However, I’m willing to make the plugin widgets-capable, which should pretty much solve your problem. If you want, you can donate a nice amount of money, which would certainly speed up the development of the new version, and which would also be some sort of paid support.

  9. Suzie Cheel on May 4, 2008 at 20:43 #

    That sounds great Alex,
    Happy to donate, would you let me know how quickly this could be done and what are you see a a fair amount I have a big hairy goal and this tool would be just the thing, problem is Have been working since last week to get something as site is launching tonight. I would need to know when i could tell my readers when they would be able to link etc

    Hope to hear from you soon.
    Suzie

  10. Alex Günsche on May 5, 2008 at 10:54 #

    Suzie, I won’t give any actual figures, because I don’t want to raise the impression that I provide direct paid support via donations. If you want to know what web development costs, have a look at gulp.com or rentacoder.com what a web developer costs in a European country, and consider that developing software takes much time for coding, testing, etc. I don’t expect you to sponsor the entire development of a new version, I just want to point out that I always have the choice between coding freely available software and being hired for projects, and I’m always interested in a good return on the invested time. ;)

    Anyway: Any donation is welcome. Also, depending on how busy I am this week, the new version of the plugin might be ready by Thursday.

  11. Alex Günsche on May 8, 2008 at 19:25 #

    Version 0.1.1 with widgets support and some minor bugfixes is available. Have fun. :)

  12. Barbara Ling on May 9, 2008 at 12:27 #

    Hi!

    Excellent plugin - what if you want to give someone a free link in the donations cloud? How is that set up?

    Thanks!

    Barbara

  13. Barbara Ling on May 9, 2008 at 12:44 #

    Also, I’m getting a Paypal error:

    “We cannot process this transaction because there is a problem with the PayPal email address supplied by the seller. ” Does it take time for Paypal to active an email address?

    Thanks!

    Barbara

  14. Suzie Cheel on May 9, 2008 at 13:04 #

    Thanks Alex,
    this is great , where are the widgets, don’t shoe anywhere?

  15. Suzie Cheel on May 9, 2008 at 13:28 #

    If you use sidebar widgets, the plugin provides two widgets you can use: one for the form, one for the cloud.

    how do you get them into the widgets in wordpress 2,5

    Normally when I put in a plugin it shows in my settings this one does not so I can’t see what to do next, have had a friend who know how to do coding look and they can’t get it to work either.

  16. Suzie Cheel on May 9, 2008 at 14:03 #

    widgets in but all over the place zenlawofattraction.com

  17. Barbara Ling on May 9, 2008 at 15:34 #

    Solved the email problem. Yay! Tell me, is there a way to view the database in Admin to see what links are there?

    I’ll be blogging about this great plugin,

    Barbara

  18. Barbara Ling on May 10, 2008 at 10:42 #

    I got everything (almost!) working. People can visit http://www.barbaraling.com , scroll down, and donate. The paypal goes thru and I receive notification of payment as well.

    Problem is, the link DOESN’T display.

    Ideas?

    Thanks!

    Barbara

  19. Michael Oeser on May 11, 2008 at 20:54 #

    Cool plugin but unfortunately I get an error in my WP admin after activating:

    WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), `donation_email` VARCHAR(127) CHARACTER]
    CREATE TABLE `wp_prinzdonations` ( `donation_id` INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, `donation_date` TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), `donation_email` VARCHAR(127) CHARACTER SET ASCII NOT NULL, `donation_txnid` VARCHAR(127) CHARACTER SET ASCII NOT NULL, `donation_amount` DECIMAL(6,2) NOT NULL, `donation_website` VARCHAR(50) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL, `donation_linktext` VARCHAR(40) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL, `donation_active` ENUM(’0′, ‘1′) DEFAULT ‘0′ ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci ENGINE = MYISAM

    I´m running PHP Version 4.4.8 and MySQL Client API version 5.0.32

  20. Suzie Cheel on May 15, 2008 at 07:10 #

    Hi Alex,
    I am a little disappointed that there is no response here. I announced this wonderful plugin, linking and tracking back twice, and still the widget doesn’t work. If i hadn’t made a donation I wouldn’t mind. Also NO BACKLINK!
    There are other having a similar problem
    Barabara and i spent several hours trying to get it to work, we made a donation on each others form, but nothing appeared in the cloud.
    Just wondering if you are planning fix this? I have about 2 weeks to use it to reach my BHAG and then was planning to use it for fundraising. afterwards.

    Look forward to your response

    Suzie

  21. Giovanni on May 15, 2008 at 13:22 #

    Is there an Asmin Control Panel for this Plugin? How can I approve or disapprove links?

  22. Giovanni on May 15, 2008 at 13:33 #

    I’ve the italian translation of this plugin, do you need?

  23. Edith Frost on May 17, 2008 at 21:01 #

    Thanks very much for this plugin. One question: would it be okay if I moved the form itself (just the form) to the popup window instead of the sidebar, or would that break something? Like, maybe the tag-cloud widget would need that code later on…

  24. Michael Visser on May 18, 2008 at 10:07 #

    Hi Suzie,

    I’ve been having the same problem as you and have resolved the issue. It’s an easy fix!.

    The minimum donation is hardcoded in donationscloud.php (on line #45) so needs to be updated to your actual defined minimum in settings.php (on line #31). Updating this line will mean that existing donations as well as future donations will appear automatically in the list.

    This is successfully working with 0.1.1. Big shout outs to Alex, this plugin is great! I’m happy to assist in co-ordinating an admin-side page to manage these settings in an easy-to-use interface :)

  25. Michael Visser on May 18, 2008 at 10:58 #

    Giovanni, there is currently no administration interface for this plugin. This would be a great feature, read comment #23.

  26. Alex Günsche on May 19, 2008 at 10:20 #

    Suzie: 1. I was on vacation for some days, therefore I couldn’t respond here. 2. Your comments #14, #15 and #16 appear quite confused. I don’t know what your problem is if you write 3 comments lacking any hints for an investigation of a problem. 3. If you made a donation, this is very nice, but it doesn’t mean that I owe you anything. I have created the plugin, which works wonderful for me and others; if it doesn’t for you, go to jobs.wordpress.net and hire someone to fix it for you.

    Michael O.: Strange, this should work with your MySQL version. I’ll have a look at the MySQL documentation, maybe I oversaw something.

    Barbara: Can you see the links in your database? Which value is in the donation_active colums? Are the donations higher that the minimum donation amount?

    Giovanni: There is no admin panel at the moment. You can approve/disapprove links by setting donation_active to 0 or 1. This should work quite conveniently with phpMyAdmin.

    Michael V.: I have no plans to create an admin interface myself, but if you want an interface and would be willing to create one, you’d be welcome to send me the code. Note, however, that I cannot guarantee that or when the code will be included.

  27. stew on May 19, 2008 at 16:58 #

    hello
    Great Plugin
    Ui have one problem, when user make a donation, the link not show.
    Can help me?
    thanks
    Stew
    Bye

  28. stew on May 19, 2008 at 20:19 #

    i have resolved it work nice, thanks!

  29. Suzie Cheel on May 20, 2008 at 07:38 #

    Hi Alex, I take you point ,

    i have started again the form is working but i get this displaying under the form

    WordPress database error: [Unknown column ‘donation_active’ in ‘where clause’]
    SELECT donation_date, donation_amount, donation_website, donation_linktext FROM wp_donations WHERE donation_date > ‘2008-04-20 01:29:29′ AND donation_amount >= ‘5′ AND donation_active = ‘1′ ORDER BY donation_linktext

    i haven’t had any problems getting other widgets to work
    I am sorry you don’t seem to want to help,
    Suzie

  30. Alex Günsche on May 20, 2008 at 09:00 #

    I am willing to help, but I expect people to try to solve the problem themselves first, and if they really need help, I expect people to write exactly one request for help with as much information as possible about the issue, about what they tried to solve it, and about their environment. The way you were asking for help does not really motivate me to help you.

    Your latest error could be caused by the fact that you installed the older version first. You can create the missing column as follows (given your table prefix is wp_):

    ALTER TABLE wp_donations ADD `donation_active` ENUM('0', '1') DEFAULT '0';

  31. Suzie Cheel on May 21, 2008 at 05:24 #

    My Aplogies,
    I was so excited when I found your plugin and frustrated that I couldn’t get it to work,
    Thank you for you understanding and patience. I will see what version i have, maybe I will uninstall and start again Would that be a better option?

    Thanks Again
    Suzie

  32. Alex Günsche on May 21, 2008 at 11:55 #

    The best option would be to open a MySQL shell or phpMyAdmin and execute the code line I posted above. Uninstalling won’t do, unless you manually delete the wp_donations table.

  33. Matt on May 23, 2008 at 21:57 #

    Hello sir,
    thanks for the plugin. I was hoping you could lend me a hand. I received my first donation today and for the life of me cant get the link to show up. I just over and over keep getting and email that says the ” Subject: The transaction does not exist in the PayPal system
    ” there is a lot of text in the e-mail that has to do with the user. I was looking through the comments above hoping I would be able to fix it. I did notice you say something about wp_donations table. I looked in my database and don’t have that table. Have I missed something? I got my api from paypal, changed the settings in setting.php and then uploaded and activated. I put the widgets on the side panel and bang no links. Thanks in advance for the help. If I am able to get this working half of my first 5 donations are yours!

  34. Martin Espericueta on May 26, 2008 at 21:21 #

    I’m trying this out on my dog site.

  35. Alex Günsche on May 26, 2008 at 21:55 #

    Matt: Which version are you using? What is the payment status (see the e-mail)? Do you see the transaction in the PayPal system?

  36. Edith Frost on May 27, 2008 at 23:15 #

    Hi there! I’ve been using the plugin and received 4 donations, but none of them were entered into my database. I mean, when I go into PHPMyAdmin, that table exists but it had zero entries. I did get the “payment received” messages from PayPal so I was able to enter the donations info by hand via PHPMyAdmin… and as long as I do that, everything works fine. (The links are displayed in the widget as you’d expect.) But I’d like to get the auto-population happening. Any idea why it might not be working? As far as I can tell, everything’s entered correctly in my settings. I’m using WordPress 2.5.1, with the plugin version 0.1.1. One of the donors said that he got an e-mail back saying there was an error during processing… but I don’t know what the error could have been, and the payment went through just fine so who knows.

    I had posted a message earlier that went unanswered (which is fine)… I’d still like to know the answer, if it’s possible to move the form code to the popup window, but at the moment it’s more important to me to get my database issue resolved. :-)

  37. Alex Günsche on May 27, 2008 at 23:24 #

    Edith, thanks for your feedback — and thanks for your donation. I have to admit that I got the same problem as you describe: I received your donation, but I didn’t get notified by my system (so I had to insert your donation manually). This is however the first time that this happens — I received the last donation two days ago, and it worked then. [Update: The very instant I submitted this comment, my system got notified of your donation. So everything is still fine here.]

    Maybe PayPal has changed their interface, and the plugin doesn’t work anymore (don’t fear, I’ll fix it if that’s the problem). Anyway, did you get an error message from my system? Could you find out what actuall error message you donor got?

  38. Edith Frost on May 28, 2008 at 00:37 #

    Thanks Alex. Here’s the message the donor got… what’s weird is says “Minimal Freaks Team” instead of the site name that’s in my settings… hmmm.

    Hello,

    first, thank you very much for your donation!
    Unfortunately, the donation could not be activated automatically,
    because there was an error during processing, most likely on our behalf.
    However, your donation is registred in our database, and we will set
    it active as soon as the payment is confirmed, so your link will be
    visible for 30 days from this moment. Sorry for the inconvenience.

    If you have problems or questions regarding your donation, please
    don’t hesitate to contact us.

    Best regards,
    Your Minimal Freaks Team

  39. Gerd on May 28, 2008 at 12:42 #

    Hallo, wo kann man denn die Schriftgröße der Spender einstellen? Das sieht sehr klein aus bei mir.

  40. Alex Günsche on May 29, 2008 at 15:10 #

    Edith: The “Minimal Freaks” stuff is strange indeed. Does “Minimal Freaks” ring a bell for you? As for the message: Do you see them in your PayPal account? Did you get an error message from your own blog, and what did their subject line say? As for the popup question: Sorry, I overlooked it (twice now :( ). But, yes, that should be possible.

    Gerd: In der Datei settings.php ist die Option DC_LINKSIZE_FUNCTION. Wenn Du hinten aus der +1 eine +4 oder so machst, sollte alles um ein paar Punkte größer werden.

  41. Martin Espericueta on May 29, 2008 at 18:32 #

    Hello. I have set up the donation, and I did get one posted to my paypal account, so that part works. But the link does not automatically show…

    I tried adding the mySQL line above, but I get: “#1060 - Duplicate column name ‘donation_active’ ”

    Any thoughts?

  42. Martin Espericueta on May 29, 2008 at 18:37 #

    Hey - it’s working now!!!

    The only other thing I did was follow Michael Visser’s advice here:
    http://www.zirona.com/software/wordpress-donations-cloud/#comment-50662

    Thanks!

  43. Edith Frost on May 29, 2008 at 21:11 #

    Re: “Minimal Freaks”… I did some googling and it seems Minimal Freaks is another blog using the Donations Cloud plugin. And the donor that forwarded the error message to me also donated to that blog. So I think what happened is, he must have gotten (almost) the same error message from both blogs, and he forwarded me the wrong one. Because I don’t see any way that variable could’ve ended up in my auto-generated e-mail.

    I never got any error messages on my own blog. I got messages from PayPal saying I had donations, but it mentioned no errors. And I go to PHPMyAdmin and the info’s not there so I end up having to fill it all in myself. Not a huge deal, but a bit of a pain.

  44. Paulo Faustino on May 30, 2008 at 12:12 #

    Hello Friend. Let me thank you for the great work with this plugin.
    I’m trying to use it in one of my blogs, and i want to build structure like the example posted. I would like to make that borders and probably use a green and smooth background.

    But unfortunely i’m getting trouble with my CSS. Can you please help me?
    I need to build a specific class for this in my stylesheet.php?

    I also translated the plugin to Portuguese. If you want to spread it, let me know.

    Regards

  45. http://www.howtospoter.com/ on May 30, 2008 at 12:30 #

    WordPress Plugins That Add Value…

    Modular design of the WordPress blog platform architecture was perhaps one of the best decisions by its author Matt M. Now anyone with knowledge can create WordPress Plugins that not only augment some functionality of the blog but also completely redef…

  46. Alex Günsche on May 30, 2008 at 19:18 #

    Martin: Is it possible that the donation was below the minimum amount? Or, did you get an error e-mail?

    Edith: Ok, that explains the “Minimal Freaks” stuff — I was really scared for a second. As for the problem, I’m afraid I have no real clue where to search, if you don’t get an error e-mail and the donations aren’t even inserted into the DB. If you are able to hack some PHP, could you take the plugin’s file paypal_ipn.php, set it up with “fake” data hardcoded, and execute it?

    Paulo: There is an included CSS file, it should work if you set up your styles there. If a certain style is not applied, it is possible that it is overwritten by a definition from your main stylesheet. As for the translated version: This is very kind of you. It would be great if you could post a link to the .po/.mo files so everybody can download them. In the next version, I would put the translations into the main file.

  47. Paulo Faustino on May 31, 2008 at 03:00 #

    Hello Alex. How can i define the anchor_text lenght?

  48. Alex Günsche on May 31, 2008 at 10:08 #

    It is hardcoded. You can change it the maxlength attribute of the field pp_linktext, and you must change the length of the table column donation_linktext.

  49. Edith Frost on May 31, 2008 at 21:05 #

    Thanks Alex… I’ll try messing with that paypal_ipn file, I’ll let you know what happens.

    (There’s no comments feed around here, is there? Kinda hard to keep up with this thread without any notifications.)

  50. Matt Chandler on June 2, 2008 at 03:42 #

    Matt: Which version are you using? What is the payment status (see the e-mail)? Do you see the transaction in the PayPal system?

    I am using v0.1.1 e-mail says the transaction id completed and it was in paypal

  51. Alex Günsche on June 3, 2008 at 09:50 #

    Edith: Usually, you can take permalink and attach feed/ to it, which works with every WP install. Unfortunately, WP is not able to create comments feeds for pages.

    Matt: Hm, all very strange. I only can offer some rather far-fetched guesses: Maybe your host doesn’t have the CURL extension installed? It also may be that PayPal had some lag in writing the Transaction ID to their own systems. Or, is it possible that your Txn ID contained characters which were neither letters, nor numbers (they would have been filtered out by the plugin)? However, the transaction should be in the DB, you can activate it manually, by opening your the wp_donations table in phpMyAdmin or so, and setting donation_active to 1. Please have a look if one of the questions helps investigating, and let me know how the next donation(s) work.

  52. Rochelle on June 9, 2008 at 04:28 #

    This looks like a great plugin but I can’t get it to work properly. I installed it fine, then made a donation to myself to test it. I received an email stating I got a donation but the link is not yet showing up on my site. It has been almost an hour.

    I tried following the advice by Michael Visser but nothing has changed. What can you, or one of your readers, suggest?

  53. joe on June 10, 2008 at 03:31 #

    I am having same issue as Edith.

    Email comes through stating:

    Unfortunately, the donation could not be activated automatically…

    I ran the process myself, so I know the payment went through with Paypal.

    Could it be CHMOD issue?

  54. dan Mc on June 10, 2008 at 05:18 #

    all works but link is not made. Tried the fix per #24 but still produces no link. I will keep checking back and feel free to email me if I can give more details. Thanks - this is a nice idea for pluggin!

  55. Alex Günsche on June 11, 2008 at 13:46 #

    Rochelle, dan Mc: The change proposed by Michael (#24) only works on future donations, and it doesn’t prevent people from donating less than the minimum amount to receive a link. Please check if the donations you received are at least as high as the value set for DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT in settings.php.

  56. dan Mc on June 11, 2008 at 18:49 #

    Yes - I was somehow thinking it would change on a previous donation, not future. I’m good!

    Thanks for a great idea and pluggin!

  57. dan Mc on June 11, 2008 at 19:14 #

    How to make the links open in new tab? so my site is still open. Is there a way or a place to insert the target=_blank ? on the links in cloud?

  58. Rochelle on June 12, 2008 at 03:37 #

    Alex,

    The link I purchased was for the minimum amount that I set but it never did show up.

  59. Mark Curtis on July 20, 2008 at 19:20 #

    I can’t seem to find any instructions on how to make this work on an individual WP Page. Could someone give me a step-by-step? I read above in the regular page text that, “(You could also have the donations cloud on a dedicated page, if it’s very large.)” and I see it working in the middle of this web page.

    Please help me.

  60. Anton Rodriguez on August 6, 2008 at 16:55 #

    Hello,
    do you know when the standalone (not WordPress-dependent) Donations Cloud solution will be online. We asked Google but no answer!

  61. How To Guides on August 7, 2008 at 16:47 #

    so, I tried the plugin..all seemed to work great..until I got my first donation. paypal sent me an email saying I got the donation…next thing I know I have 10 emails a minute hitting my email server saying there was a failure. the plugin did not show the new link and the donator was getting the same email.over and over and over again. I’ve since had to reactivate the plug-in.

  62. Alex Günsche on August 7, 2008 at 23:33 #

    Anton, sorry, I don’t know when that will be. I’ve got a lot to do these days.

  63. Gary Jones on September 22, 2008 at 21:08 #

    Just a quick follow-up - I did contact PayPal support and received the usual useless answer. They suggested I research the issue. Yeah, right. I did make a suggestion to them that, given all the posts I found about the many problems with trying to add PayPal to a WordPress site, that they should develop their own plug-in and make it available on their site. Maybe there’s work in there for you, as I think yours could be an excellent optional plug-in for them to promote?

  64. Stephane on October 28, 2008 at 20:46 #

    The download link is no longer working.

  65. Philipp on October 31, 2008 at 01:08 #

    Probably very easy, too easy, but I cannot get the language correct. The popup is german, but the rest isn’t (donationcloud.php) although the correct .mo file exists. I would appreciate a little pointing in the wright direction ;) so I can actually use this great plugin..
    Thanks.

  66. Philipp on November 1, 2008 at 01:25 #

    ahh too late for a last edit, sorry,
    don’t forget to add a Slash ‘/’ after /donationscloud

    thus being:

    ..../donationscloud/

    maybe the admin could correct my above post and delete this one.

    Again, sorry…

  67. Paul on November 11, 2008 at 15:03 #

    The Download Link is not correct. Can’t we download this plugin anymore?

    Paul

  68. Michael Visser on December 20, 2008 at 11:05 #

    Hey Alex,

    It’s been some time since I used your plugin but I’m going to give it a shot again, I’ll put together an admin interface and send it your way soon (coming weeks).

    This is a great plugin which I’d like to see further developed. :) I’m adding a minimum donation validation script to the Donate button to ensure that all donations do infact turn into links before donation :)

  69. Michael Visser on December 20, 2008 at 12:11 #

    Readers might like to know I’ve just published an article on adding minimum donation checking to Donations Cloud and that Donations Cloud works fine with WordPress 2.7 too!

    Feel free to implement this and other code into your plugin Alex. :)

  70. Johnny on April 16, 2009 at 13:36 #

    To those of you having trouble with cloud items showing up in the database or in the cloud display, it’s most likely curl. Ensure that curl is installed *for php*. This is not commandline curl but the php addon. For me under ports it’s known as php5-curl. Talk to your provider if you don’t know what this is.

  71. Egypt Urnash on May 24, 2009 at 16:34 #

    This is a pretty clever plugin - I’ll donate something to you as soon as I have a few more bucks in my paypal account. *grin*

    Here’s a feature suggestion: Customize the URL to which donators are sent after a donation. (in webcomics circles, for instance, a lot of people will send you to a page with some backdrops for your computer as a simple, cheap way to say “thanks!”.)

  72. Yan on June 7, 2009 at 09:37 #

    Hi!
    I have a PAYPAL premier account. How do I get the API information that this plugin require?
    Help please. Thank you!

  73. PIerre on June 23, 2009 at 12:23 #

    Just noticed that this plugin is using the same table (wp_donations) as another paypal donation script I’m using. Is it possible in an easy way to change the tablename? I find {$wpdb->prefix}donations in the donationscloud.php. So I was thinking that just changing that to ex. {$wpdb->prefix}donations2 everywhere int “donationscloud.php”, on a fresh plugin - install it - would fix this?

    I guess I have to manually add the donations I’ve allreadyrecieved (but not showing) into mysql?

    Thanks!

  74. Harsha Koda on September 1, 2009 at 13:42 #

    is there a way to insert some dummy donatiosn so people think that there have been more donations before them. essentially where is the database of the donations?

  75. Gordon on October 20, 2009 at 10:21 #

    Hello together,

    i have a lit problem. The plugin works fine except of one thing.
    The User use the form, put everthing in, is paying by payal, i get the mail from the plugin and paypal, the money is at paypal… BUT the link is not active. I have to go the by myself in the database and have to activate them. I guess that should work automatically… right?
    Can someone help me? I don’t know if the user see some error messages… i don’t got/saw error messages.

    Thanks
    Gordon

  76. Fiona B on November 9, 2009 at 17:00 #

    Hi, Great widget! I just received my first donation, but when you click the link, my blog address is in the link, and it wont work. Please let me know how I can remove my blog address from the link so it works properly?

    Thanks in advance.

  77. Lucato on January 28, 2010 at 11:24 #

    Hi there, your plug-in seems amazing. I’m wondering if it is possible to make it just shows into an article instead of the sidebar. I mean, like using those brackets with the shortcode inside it for the donation box and other for showing the cloud box. (E.g.: [dc_donate]. [dc_cloud])

    Thanks in advance.

    P.S.: Write me back in my e-mail, once I didn’t find a link to chose to subscribe to your comments reply.

    Btw, exchanging the subject, what WP plug-in do you use for your comments, that you get to EDIT the comments before approval. Thanks.

  78. Lucato on January 29, 2010 at 10:54 #

    Hey Alex, it would be great if the next update would have the $donation_email messages into the .po files, and it would get to recognize if the e-mail was from .br and would use the pt-br.mo file. I mean, maybe we would set it somewhere. :0)

  79. Lucato on January 29, 2010 at 12:49 #

    Hey Alex, I’ve made a donation to myself to try it out, and I got the following $_post e-mails in sequence:

    - The transaction does not exist in the PayPal system.
    - The donation was made;

    Pretty weird, it says that was made but it doesn’t show the links. The database keeps as 0 instead of 1 after receiving the “The donation was made” e-mail. So, I got some doubts:

    1. Shouldn’t it update automatically? (I had to active it manually in the database)
    2. Can it be because I don’t have a business account and didn’t fill the API fields into the settings.php or there is no problem the API be empty and have no business account?
    3. Am I missing some settings/stuff here?
    4. Excahnging the subject. How do I get to make the Donation link open up into a new window instead of in the same window? What PHP file and line should I edit and replace?

    Thanks in advance.

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