Improved Caching, Simple FES, and Auto-Approve Projects

As the leader in WordPress Crowdfunding, we’ve been working very hard to iterate, add new features, and ensure that our product’s release cycle matches the pulse of the current fundraising market. If you look at the pace of recent releases, you’ll see that major version updates are being released faster than ever. Unfortunately, we’ve been so busy building new updates that we haven’t had a chance to talk about them. Now is the time to change that!

Improved Caching

While IgnitionDeck has always been developed with a focus on page speed and database efficiency, we’ve doubled our efforts over the last few releases to ensure that project pages, the project grid, and the admin area load faster than ever. This includes a reduction in duplicate queries, and the rewriting of multiple legacy functions.

Simple Front-End Submission

The most common feature request over the past 3 years from our WordPress crowdfunding community has been the option to remove levels from the front-end submission form. As a result, we’ve been conceptualizing and developing beta versions of this functionality over the past 18 months. Eventually we realized that some major codebase rewrites were in order, and so we begun the long process of integrating the necessary hooks and filters to make this happen.

The end result is our Simple FES Module, which was built with charity and donation based platforms in mind, and with the goal to make project creation as simple as humanly possible. Using this module, creators face a form that is far less complex, and backers a donation link that significantly reduces buyer tension.

It’s been a long time coming, but we believe that this will completely revolutionize the way Enterprise users can extract value from the product.

Auto-Approve Projects

Now that Simple FES has unlocked additional fundraising potential, it made sense to enable auto-approve functionality on top of it. Once enabled (found under the Enterprise Settings screen), you’ll never need to review and publish a project again!  This is a no-brainer for non-profit donation based platforms that know their users are not making sweeping promises of what they will create like they would on a product crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo.

Google eCommerce Fixes and Improvements

The Google eCommerce module for IgnitionDeck Commerce has been available for several months, but one thing that wasn’t possible with their conversion tracking was tracking of free products.  Thanks to the newest release of IgnitionDeck Commerce, you can now track and measure every conversion throughout your product funnel, which is an essential piece of business analytics for e-commerce platforms. This opens a world of possibilities when it comes to using free products as a funnel to your paid products, and you can now see what is the most effective avenue for you to put your focus.

Also, the Google eCommerce module now works with all gateways! No more limitations.

True Guest Checkout

Guest checkout has been a feature inside IgnitionDeck for 3+ years, but in IgnitionDeck Commerce 1.7.7 we released what we’ve dubbed ‘True Guest Checkout.’ Now guests can breeze through checkout and review their receipt immediately on the site.  What this means, is that no email address is required to be stored in the system, thus ensuring they will be able to select guest checkout on your WordPress crowdfunding site indefinitely in the future as well!

The Fee Mods Module

Released in IgnitionDeck Commerce 1.7.6, the IgnitionDeck Commerce Fee Mods Module was created for Enterprise users that use the Stripe Connect payment gateway. Fee Mods allows you to set the transaction fee on a per-project basis for the projects on your own crowdfunding platform.  This means one project could have a 10% transaction fee, while another project could only be 2.5%. The choice is yours!

Where Does IgnitionDeck WordPress Crowdfunding Go From Here?

We have a many more features under development and on the horizon.  Here at IgnitionDeck, we don’t like to put the cart before the horse, which is why you don’t often hear about a new feature until it’s been released already.  Keep an eye on the release notes to see what other features we sneak in before we announce them!