Giving season is coming up and we’ve been busy busy getting the Gift Catalog into shape. In fact, we’ve made close to 40 updates to the underlying platform since the Pantheon migration. We’ve also improved the roadmap, which now includes better descriptions of the updates and task queue as well as a list of known issues with the platform. The changelog let’s you know when we add things, push things out, and otherwise make changes. I would recommend taking a look if you haven’t seen it in a while. It’s all in a Goolge Doc, so it will require permission to access.

One the biggest update to the Campaign feature, which now allows monetary goals. You can learn all about that here.

In another large update, we created a “product API” that will allow you to put products on other websites. We have a blog post outlining that here.

We also added the ability to upload and bulk edit Products and Product Displays from a CSV file. It is a beast of a file and can bungle your products if not used correctly, so it is turned off by default. Let us know if you would like to turn it on and train you on how to use it. We’re toying with creating a streamlined version next year.

Product Displays

We’ve also made a series of updates to the Product Displays.

Set the a default card for the cart.

You can now choose a default card type for users. So, for example, if you want products to default to eCards when users hit the cart, all you need to do is indicate it.

Send donors directly to payment

You’ll also this new option when configuring a Product Display:

“Add to Cart” works just like it does now – the user clicks and the item is added to the cart. The “Buy it Now” option, however, will add a “Buy it Now” button to the product page and anywhere the product is featured in a product card. This button will send the user directly to the payment page with the product in the cart – bypassing all intermediary steps. This is a great feature for donor acquisition where you want the experience to be more streamlined.

If you don’t like the copy “Buy it Now” or want the button color to be different, please let us know. Those are easy customizations to make to your catalog.

Don’t forget! You can create multiple Product Displays for a given product. You may want to test out different approaches and landing pages with different product configurations. And since “Buy it Now” takes the user straight to the payment page, you don’t need to configure cards if your not including “Add to Cart” as an option.

Other Minor Enhancements & Updates

• You can now add a “Featured Gifts” block to the top of the products list on a category page.
• Oh yeah, and you don’t have to add the price and image each time you add a product to a featured gifts card component. That was annoying.
• You can update the copy “Split Gift” (in the cart) through the Control Panel.
• Product list in offline giving process now indicates if a product is disabled.
• Credit card type is available through Raisers Edge export
• We upgraded to PHP 7.1
• Minor improvements to Campaign stats emails, end date, and help text. We also removed the requirement that there be a goal, end date, and impact.
• Improved payment logging to better identify which payment method (e.g., Paypal or Authorize.net) was being used in situations where user encountered an error during the transaction process. This is mostly for sites where the catalog uses multiple payment methods.
• Choose Your Own Amount products are now available through “Send eCard on Demand” feature.
• Minor update to Product Display eCard preview – quantity indication removed
  Ability to create a Group Gift can now be done from product card views. Previously, this could only be done from a product page for most clients.
• The minimum transaction amount for the order is now calculated at payment step rather than cart. This value is currently set to $5 to prevent fraudulent charges. We can adjust at your request.
• We hid the “Gift of the Month” Product and Product Display. We’ll be removing it completely in 2019. This feature was never baked. 🙁
• Added a way to export eNewsletter sign-ups for organizations that have an email sign-up in the footer and don’t have dynamic integration with their CRMs.

Bug Squashing

• Choosing a product from various lists when editing content components was tedious for administrators. We fixed that by organizing product lists by product type (e.g., Symbolic Gifts) and alphabetized them.
• Several fixes to recurring gifts. We added automated method for stopping recurring gifts that try to charge off schedule. We fixed an issue where recurring gifts don’t record as tax deductible after the first gift. We improved recurring gifts monitoring.
• We fixed an issue where recurring entities were being created even though CYOA product wasn’t configured to be recurring. Finally, we implemented a workaround for the 2038 bug. Note: the recurring gifts feature is not yet live. We need to do more extensive testing next year before turning it back on.
• Issue where controls related to Workbench Moderation were displaying on entities with shared IDs
• Issue related to cookies and cache was resolved with move to Pantheon
• Resolved issue where “Box” appeared instead of the Greeting Card surcharge
• Removed phantom tab group in the tracking step of the offline giving feature
  CVV help wasn’t displaying correctly – fixed that
• Fixed an issue preventing “Make this a Group Gift” option from displaying
• Removed smart quotes from URLs fixing an issue related to URL redirecting correctly
• Resolved issue where “commerce_order()” is empty. This bug was pretty much limited to testing environments, but happened when a recurring entity was being processed but the originating order had been deleted.
• Removed receipt number from order complete page due to the receipt number getting generated in a separate process on a different timeline.
• Fixed issue caused when teams from two different Campaigns shared the same ID.
• Fixed issue preventing admins from editing or creating premiums (introduced by PHP 7.1 update)

You can see these updates, updates we moved to 2019, and what’s still to come this year and more on our roadmap.

Thanks for your patience this year with the move and updates. We’ll be sorting out the full roadmap for Q1 and Q2 in 2019 over the next two months. Let us know if you really want something to make the list or if you want to sponsor an update.

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The Capellic Gift Catalog is a Drupal-based catalog for nonprofit symbolic gift giving, eCards, and more. You can learn more about it here or fill out the form below.