Donations, Subscriptions, Feeds and Notifications

I'm trying to consolidate our three donation forms into a single form and could use some insight. The three forms as they exist now are:

1. Donation Form — Set up with the old donation field type, it includes an other amount in addition to a field with a set group of options.

2. Monthly Recurring Donation/Subscription — When this was set up, it was not possible to have one form with both one-time and recurring donation options (since each is a different type of feed).

3. Downloads Donation Form — This is similar to number 1, but doesn't have an 'other' amount because the user notification includes links to files that can be downloaded in exchange for a certain amount of donation.

In consolidating, I've run into some issues that I need to figure out or resolve:

1. Based on my research so far, it doesn't seem possible to use one form for both donations and subscriptions. I know there's some new support for multiple feeds, but it's not clear to me how to trigger that from a form. Also, I'd need to make sure that donations have a floor, i.e. if someone gives $1, they don't get access to something that requires a $15 donation.

2. One of the other goals is an improved mechanism for gathering address information. Right now, we use the International format because it's the more universal of the formats, but I've designed a setup where the user says they're in the United States, Canada or Other and they get a corresponding group of addresses depending on what they choose. That actually works well, but the Paypal feeds want an address, city, state and zip and we have three addresses, three city fields, etc. (e.g. U.S. Address (City), Canadian Address (City), and International (City)). It's not clear to me how to adjust this or if it's even possible.

3. Depending on some fields checked, i.e. subscribe to the newsletter, I want an e-mail address added to the notification when the form is submitted.

4. Also depending on some fields checked, I want to modify the user notification e-mail and html response to include some links to download files when the form is submitted.

I have the form built and the UI is working pretty much like I want. I've also hooked into some things, like adding a custom number as the invoice number to the PayPal and also adding that field (so that we have a matching number at PayPal when the IPN failes).

Any help or suggestions is much appreciated.

Thanks

Dennis

Dennis, The PayPal Add-On v1.4 update allows you to create multiple PayPal Feeds per form and using the Condition option on the Feed decide which one gets executed based on selections made by the user.

The idea behind this is, you create a product field and let's say it has 3 pre-defined prices. Then you can have an option field below it that asks is this a one-time donation or a recurring one.

Then you would setup two PayPal feeds. One of them would be a product/donation and the other would be subscription. On the condition to send to PayPal, you would select the appropriate answer on that option field. So if they select recurring it goes to PayPal on the subscription feed, if they select one-time, it goes to PayPal on the Product/Donation feed.

I'm still working on some of my other issues, but I figured out the deal with multiple feeds. First of all, because I was using the old-style donation field, the condition was not available that let me say whether or not a feed was triggered. So, once I added a product field instead of a donation, I was able to have both donation and subscription feeds, which was my desire. It's really straight forward, but not always apparent when digging through documentation under deadline.

Thanks for posting this, Dennis! We appreciate it.