Our site is based on WordPress.  We had a link to a PayPal donation page that we used for awhile. On recommendation by another organization we created an account at Stripe and are converting our online payment processing to Stripe.

We have a WordPress plugin called “Full Stripe” which handles the transactions.We went ahead and paid for the “pro” version of the plugin.

The Full Stripe plugin hosts the donation form. This is placed on a  regular WordPress page (i.e., not a post.).  

Once the form is filled out, and the credit card is successfully charged, the form will automatically take the user to a thank-you page.

The plugin generates a thank-you email which is sent to the email address that the donor puts into the form.  This email can be customized using regular html.  Right now there isn’t a very elegant way of editing or testing within  the email so  I did all the editing in Notepad++ and then pasted the resulting html into the plugin’s eMail form.

After some fiddling we got the form, the thank-you page, and the thank-you eMail all set.

YAPI (Yet Another Plugin)

For the plugin to be able to email donor receipts, it has to be able to access an SMTP server. In our case, we’re using Google Apps for Work, so that we installed a GMail plugin that overrides the PHP mail code inherent in WordPress.  The receipts are sent from a gmail account on our domain.  This took just a few minutes to set up and has a form for testing.

Review

So,  let’s review all of the bits and pieces necessary for the full solution:

• Stripe – an account with Stripe connected to your bank account.
• The WordPress Full Stripe plugin.  We purchased Full Stripe, and have been pleased with the enhanced capability over the free version as well as prompt and knowledgeable tech support. (Actually, we love the developer’s company name….Mammothology  Software…. we’d purchase anything from them.  🙂 )
• The donation form.  This form is defined using parameters that are set by the Full Stripe plugin.  Right now the options are fairly modest in terms of formatting and fields, but the appearance is attractive and clean.
• The donation page.  This is a WordPress page  that contains a WordPress shortcode pointing to the donation form defined in the Full Stripe Plugin.
• The Thank-You Page.  This is another WordPress page that serves as a landing page after the donor successfully fills in the form and completes their transaction.
• The Gmail plugin.  — Needed to send email from our Google Apps for Work domain.
• The Thank-You email.   This is a personalized email sent to the donor.  The html code for this is defined within the plugin.  As noted,  I tested this with code written in Notepad++ (on Windows) and TextWrangler on the Mac.
• The Stripe Thank-You email.   This is a second email that comes from Stripe which shows the last 4 digits of the credit card, and that fact that the card was successfully charged.