Episode 1
In this episode, Michelle Frechette and Jeff Chandler talk with Jason Adams, StellarWP Director of Development, about GiveWP 3.0, and specifically about the new GiveWP Form Builder.
For more information on GiveWP visit GiveWP.com.
Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:02 Welcome to WP Constellations, a podcast exploration of the WordPress universe. Brought to you by StellarWP.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Welcome to WP Constellations, the newest endeavor with StellarWP. And, uh, I’m excited cuz this is our first episode and I’m here with my esteemed co-host, Jeff Chandler. Hey Jeff, how are you?
Speaker 3 00:00:27 How you doing, Michelle? I’m very excited to, uh, go on this journey with you across Yeah, the out here limits of space, the WordPress universe in today’s inaugural guest, the first one on our show, congratulations to Jason Adams, who is the manager of development of GiveWP. Jason, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2 00:00:48 I’d like to say, Hey, Jason, Jeff, tell him what he wins. But you don’t win anything, Jason. You just you win the opportunity to be our first guest and welcome. We’re so glad that you’re here today.
Speaker 4 00:00:58 Thanks so much. I appreciate being here. And actually, uh, a month ago, I probably need to update at more places, but yeah, now I’m the, uh, director of development for StellarWP.
Speaker 2 00:01:12 Fantastic. Ooh, well
Speaker 3 00:01:14 Congratulations. Sounds like a promotion. Hey.
Speaker 4 00:01:17 Yeah, yeah. So I, I’m, so Give is now one of the four brands that I help oversee, but it, uh, it is still, it will always be, uh, precious to me is I love Give I love what we do.
Speaker 2 00:01:29 Likewise, I don’t know if you know this, Jeff, but Jason and I worked together at, uh, GiveWP prior to Liquid Web’s acquisition of GiveWP. So we were way back.
Speaker 4 00:01:40 Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 00:01:42 So you two have seen a few things or two , you know,
Speaker 3 00:01:45 I mean, you’re, you were there, you were, this is the before times.
Speaker 2 00:01:49 I can promise you that Jason fielded more of my questions than I fielded of Jason’s questions, . Cause I was the, the, you know, the, the person that kind of like met with the customers and then said, I don’t know. Let me check with Jason to see if we can do that.
Speaker 3 00:02:03 . So Jason, one of the reasons we brought you on the show here is to talk about GiveWP 3.0 and specifically the visual form builder. Yeah. I know you and the, you and some members of the team did a webinar about two weeks ago announcing the visual forum beta demo mm-hmm. . And I’d like you to kind of give us a top down overview of what the visual form, uh, and GiveWP is all about and why it’s such a big deal.
Speaker 4 00:02:30 Yeah. So, um, historically in Give we’re kind of calling Give to a 0.0 at this point is it’s kind of the, that old world, um, uh, options oriented way of constructing a form where you describe your form using a whole bunch of settings, right? So like, do you want anonymous donations or, uh, do you want there to be a fee, uh, fee recovery option, or do you want recurring? Like it’s all very, just, it’s a bunch of settings and you fill it out and then, uh, you click publish and then you go on the front end and you view and you’re like, what did I come up with, uh, after putting all of these settings together? Um, and so that was the, that’s the way it has worked for a long time. And with that, there was a lot of things that were really, really hard to do, such as if, if I have my first name and last name field and I have my email field and I want to move my email field above my first name and last name field, well, when everything’s just kind of settings to do that sort of form, building as it were, is a lot harder.
Speaker 4 00:03:48 Uh, because you’re just describing something. You’re not really getting the ability to like visually move things around. And, um, and so, uh, so we wanted to tackle that problem and come about it in a completely new way. Uh, and so we leveraged how Gutenberg works, which is what the block editor uses under the hood. And we’re like, well, that’s a really great dragon drop experience, um, for people to be able to move elements around and visualize it. Uh, and so we’re like, let’s do that. So we, uh, brought in our own version of Gutenberg, as it were, uh, and started using that to build our own builders. So what’s new in the donation form Builder is that now it’s, you actually see, this is my form, here’s the various sections.
Speaker 3 00:04:40 So, so it, so it’s actually turned into more of a wizzy wig. Finally what you see is what you get. And, and then Gutenberg and, uh, thanks to Guttenberg and a black editor, I think we’ve reached a point now and it’s been out, Gutenberg was added to WordPress back in 2018. Um, but now it’s gotten to the point where I think users kind of expect that modern flow of visually being able to drag things instead of messing with a bunch of different toggles and radio buttons.
Speaker 4 00:05:07 Exactly. Yeah. And, and so it’s like going back to the example before of like, I want to move my email filled above name, okay, drag and drop it , you know, or like, whatever you want to do. And we’ve really tried to make it as open-ended as possible, where if you wanna have four sections where you break up your fields a certain way, or you want one big one or whatever you wanna do, you truly have control over the presentation of your form. Um, and so that’s like, that’s the first piece of the visual donation form builder is just the ability to visually construct your form. And then the second piece that we’re like, um, it’s kind of funny, like that first p is like, it’s really exciting, but the second piece is like almost more exciting if you understand the implications, is that like, we’ve totally rebuilt how forms work from the ground up and GiveWP, uh, and something that we really wanted to maximize was giving people the ability to not only construct their fields, but also imagine any design possible.
Speaker 4 00:06:22 Like any design you can come up with. And our customers, we have, you know, over a hundred thousand, like, they come up with a lot of really creative ways of being able to present donation forms to people. And we really wanted to make that as customizable a process as possible and as easy as possible. And so once you construct your form, you can go to this design mode, and when you’re in design mode, you can then select, Hey, what form design do you want to use for this? And it can be anything. And we plan on rolling out dozens of different form designs and we’ve made it so easy to make your own. And if there’s a form design that’s really close to what you want, but you want to tweak it a little bit, you can easily do that. Like, it is an incredibly powerful system, uh, for truly making a donation form of any kind, any structure and any appearance that you want.
Speaker 2 00:07:20 I just built a new gift form last, well, the last two weeks on one of my new websites that I put together. Um, I use for a lot of podcasts that I do, I use Give forms for, um, for sponsorship, right? It works really well. And because you have the form field manager, which has always been one of my favorite add-ons, you can collect additional information. So for sponsorships, I’m looking for logos, I’m looking for write-ups, you know, additional fields. Does the new, um, drag and drop form builder also work with the, um, the form field manager and and how does that work together?
Speaker 4 00:07:55 Yeah, so we’re actually gonna take some of what’s possible only in the form Field Manager now and bring it into the free version of Give. So in the free version of Give, uh, you’ll be able to add custom fields, uh, such as a simple text field or a text area. And then what Form Field Manager is going to become is all it’s gonna actually do is introduce more types of custom fields. So check boxes, dropdowns, uh, visibility conditions for your field. So if you want, you know, if you want a, um, you know, some, uh, like event detail fields to show up if the person is donating equal to or above $200, right? Like you can do that, uh, some forum Field manager is gonna take what we have and just add more of it. Where before a forum field manager was like, it was the only way to be able to add custom fields, right? Mm-hmm. now with the visual donation form builder, it just has that form Field manager just makes it even more powerful with more types of fields that you can add.
Speaker 2 00:08:58 That’s great. Customers have been asking for that for years, as long as I’ve been involved with gi, which is a long time. Um, so this is wonderful news that people, and that you’re adding so much of it to the free GiveWP plugin that can be found right in the, um, the plugins directory on wordpress.org is, uh, phenomenal. More people, more businesses nowadays tend to pull back those kinds of features and make people pay for them. I love that. Give practices its philanthropy by providing more and more to the free users to be able to, um, do the fundraising that they wanna do. So congratulations. They’re,
Speaker 3 00:09:33 They’re actually giving with their product
Speaker 2 00:09:36 . Right? Exactly.
Speaker 4 00:09:38 I mean, everything I’ve described so far is free.
Speaker 2 00:09:43 I love that.
Speaker 4 00:09:44 Except like the
Speaker 3 00:09:46 Consider consider my mind blown
Speaker 4 00:09:49 . Yeah. The, the whole visual donation form builder form designs, all that customization, that’s all free. That’s just in the free version. That’s great. We give, that’s great.
Speaker 2 00:09:58 I love that. That’s fantastic. Um, and is it already available? Will it be available soon? How is the rollout working?
Speaker 4 00:10:06 Uh, well, you know, we’re alwa people are always, uh, nervous to give timelines for things, but we right now have the feature plugin released. Uh, and to be clear for folks that know what I mean by that, basically, um, we want to get the visual donation form builder, right? Really bad. Like we wanna make sure it’s solving real problems and that it’s, uh, intuitive for folks. So we made a ver a plugin, uh, called the visual donation Form Builder beta plugin that you can download or you can go to GiveWP.com and just we have a way for you to spin up a whole new site to test it out, um, uh, and then to just give us feedback and let us know like, Hey, is this, does this fit what you’re looking for? We think it does, but we really wanna make sure it does for you.
Speaker 4 00:10:57 So that’s out right now and we are really hoping people will take advantage of that. Uh, and then, and then we’re really hoping, uh, that in, uh, what would that be? Probably like q3 mm-hmm. , uh, is when we would get 3.0 out the door. Nice. Um, and get it into people’s hands. Um, we’re right now in the process of like the visual donation form builders basically done mm-hmm. . Um, and now we’re doing what we call feature parody, which is like Give two could do all of these things that people expect. Well Give three needs to be, to do, be able to do all the same things and more. So we’re currently just catching everything up. Um, and then we’ll, uh, yeah. And then our next big effort will be how to migrate what we’re calling V two forms to p3 forms and make that a mm-hmm. safe and easy process. Cuz we do not want anybody to lose a single donation in the journey.
Speaker 2 00:12:01 Sure. Well that makes sense. Well,
Speaker 3 00:12:03 We, we don’t need users upgrading and they’re like, oh no, everything’s broken. We don’t need any more of those experiences. And we’re pressed now, now that the visual form builder, the future plugin, it’s been released, I think it’s been out available for about two weeks now. Mm-hmm. , what sort of feedback have you seen so far?
Speaker 4 00:12:20 Um, largely positive, honestly. Um, mostly like the kinds of questions we’re getting are just, uh, very small and very nuanced of like, oh, can I do this little itty bitty thing? Um, uh, and that’s all great , right? And that’s the kind of feedback we hope to find, you know, the um, you know, because it all means somebody’s looking at this and going, I like it. This would make it even better as opposed to what have you done ? Like, I don’t wanna do this, I wanna do my own way. Yeah. I like the way better. So far we’ve literally got,
Speaker 2 00:13:01 We’ll see you Jason Adams though,
Speaker 4 00:13:03 , right? So far we’ve had no feedback that anybody is looking at this and, and thinking it’s equal to, or a step in the wrong direction. Everybody’s like, no, this is, this is really great. Next level. Yeah, exactly. That’s what we want to hear.
Speaker 2 00:13:18 That’s fantastic. That’s awesome. Um, if people are interested in learning more, obviously GiveWP.com. Uh, you can scroll down on the homepage, there’s a C live demo. Um, you can download the free GiveWP and also in the footer you can subscribe to the newsletter, which also gives you a 15% discount if you decide to go back for some plans. Uh, but the newsletter is probably the best place to stay on top of the newest releases. Right. So the newsletter will always let you know when things have been added. And you can also join the Facebook group for GiveWP, we have one of those as well. And, um, is there a, is there a place in GitHub that people can watch or is it still, is it, is it open or not? If people are interested in kind of seeing what you’re doing?
Speaker 4 00:14:01 Uh, yeah, you can find it on GitHub. Um, trying to think of the best way for somebody to do that. I mean, if you just Google like GitHub, GiveWP donation form builder, like, uh, that’ll show up cause they’re, um, the plugin. Eventually this plugin’s gonna be merging in a course, so mm-hmm. , this isn’t going be actually right. Yeah. Where we’re building it now, uh, the plugin is open source, like anybody can go see what we’re doing.
Speaker 2 00:14:30 So Jason will give us a link to that and we’ll put it in the show notes as well. So if anybody’s interested in kind of clicking over there and kind of watching what’s happening, you’re more than welcome to do that. Absolutely. What are some things that you hope that people come back to you and say a year from now about, um, the success that they’ve had with the, um, the upgrades and things that are going on with GiveWP?
Speaker 4 00:14:52 Oh my goodness, that’s such a good question.
Speaker 4 00:14:57 Um, I think I just want people to be able to say like, I made something I didn’t know I was capable of making. Oh,
Speaker 2 00:15:10 Cool.
Speaker 4 00:15:10 And it worked so successfully Well, um, and it was so easy, uh, and, and compared to everybody else, it was so affordable. Mm-hmm. , um, you know, like, you know, our, our line, it still remains, you know, democratizing generosity. Like, we wanna make it as easy as possible for people to be able to make an amazing experience that helps, uh, fund their incredible causes.
Speaker 2 00:15:37 Absolutely. I love that. Um, uh, my, my goal when I was the director of customer success, there was always like, how can we help you make more money using our fundraising forms? And I think that the updates and things that you’re doing with WP and the advances, advancements that y’all are making, absolutely work towards that end. So on behalf of everybody, I’m grateful to you for, for how the plugin continues to grow and morph with the needs of, um, the consumer base. So I really do appreciate all of the hard work that y’all are doing.
Speaker 4 00:16:08 Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate it. And, and this is just the beginning, like we mm-hmm. , um, we’re already talking about Give 3.1 and like we, we know what’s next. Like we know what this opens up for us. And we’re, uh, we’re really excited about all the things that, that this opens for us to be able to make, like part of this, and part of this is just like developing a product is you, you reach a point when you’re creating a thing where like you have all these amazing ideas, but the problem is that like the way your product was built wasn’t built to be able to support these amazing ideas mm-hmm. . So you have to kind of, a ship of thesis is sort of a thing. You have to reconstruct it while at c uh, and keep the identity of the product intact. Mm-hmm. . Um, but once you get past that point, and this point for us is 3.0, this backlog, this, uh, everything behind the, the, the dam as it were of, of 3.0 is gonna open up and we can suddenly do even more exciting things.
Speaker 2 00:17:17 Fantastic.
Speaker 3 00:17:18 I, I do have one question for you, Jason, before we wrap this up because I think it’s an important question and a lot of people out there are probably interested to learn about how has the focus been on accessibility, accessibility issues with the visual form builder? Because that brings about its own set of unique challenges. How has the team addressed accessibility?
Speaker 4 00:17:39 That’s a really good question. So we’ve addressed it in two different spots primarily. One is of course, in the visual donation form builder itself. By utilizing Gutenberg and not trying to construct this ourselves from the ground up, we’re able to, uh, get the most out of the accessibility work being done in Gutenberg, which I know at this point is not, um, like not everybody thinks it’s, it’s at the standard that it should be, but what’s great is that we know that there is continued efforts being made on the front and we’re able to continue to, to pull on that. So as it improves, we improve too. And that also means that as we’re able as, and we have made contributions back to Guttenberg at this point, and I only see us continuing to do more and more of that. So kind of a all ships rise with the tide sort of a thing as we, you know, as we work together. So that’s the one side is the admin experience of the visual donation form builder. And then on the front end, the actual forms themselves, uh, um, don’t go tune of the weeds buddy.
Speaker 3 00:18:54 I appreciate the pause and finding yourselves. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:18:57 As Michelle’s eyes glaze over. No, I’m kidding. Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:19:00 My, my dad’s a mechanical engineer and he says never ask an engineer what time it is because they’ll tell you how a clock works.
Speaker 2 00:19:07 That’s good ones.
Speaker 4 00:19:09 Uh, so, so on the front end, um, basically the, the default way that the form is structured, we really took accessibility into consideration there to make sure that like all fields have proper labels, uh, required fields are marked properly. Um, all of that, those little accessibility nuances, uh, that make a big difference when somebody is trying to especially use a screen reader or something like that. Um, sizing, color contrast, uh, all of those sorts of things have come into consideration while we’re building out the front end. So yeah, we, we want to, you know, our customers are not accessibility professionals. Uh, and so we wanna make it where the default is. Excellent accessibility
Speaker 3 00:19:56 And that’s something I would love to see across. I I wish it would be ha happen across all WordPress products where accessibility was just great, was just a default.
Speaker 2 00:20:05 Mm-hmm. . Absolutely. Okay, so my last question for you is not, um, form related at all. I wanna know, when are you gonna get the, the Give tattoo?
Speaker 4 00:20:17 ? Oh man,
Speaker 3 00:20:19 How many, how many people are we up to so far that has that tattoo?
Speaker 2 00:20:22 Up, we’re up to three. We’re up to three. Three. And and we also work
Speaker 4 00:20:26 Heres at this point, yeah. I, I’ve always just struggled with, with the like, you know, what do I wanna permanently put on my body forever? also, I’m, I’m also just kind of a lazy person by nature in many ways. So like the idea of like me having to schedule an appointment and go and all this, I’m like, , uh,
Speaker 3 00:20:48 How did we end up getting you on the show today? That’s what I wanted.
Speaker 2 00:20:51 Come, come to Word Camp.
Speaker 4 00:20:53 I didn’t have to leave my house. Oh, I gotcha.
Speaker 2 00:20:56 Come to Word Camp US, um, and Taylor and I will talk you into getting tattoos with us. It’s, it’s a tradition. . Anyway, thank you so much Jason for spending some time with us today. Um, if a people, like I said, if people are interested in learning more, GiveWP.com. Um, also all the information that we’ve talked about today will be in the show notes along with the transcript of today’s episode. Thank you Jason for being here. Thank you Jeff for being the perfect co-host and, uh, we’ll see everybody on the next episode.
Speaker 4 00:21:23 Sounds great. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 00:21:25 Thanks again, Jason. Bye everybody.
Speaker 4 00:21:28 Bye.
Speaker 1 00:21:34 WP Constellations is a production of StellarWP, home of The Events Calendar, LearnDash, GiveWP, Kadence, Iconic, SolidWP, Orderable, and Restrict Content Pro. Learn more about the StellarVerse at stellarwp.com.