Hi, @pedubreuil.
Glad you reached out.
Every time a donation is made on your site – or attempted, GiveWP creates a new entry on the logs section on the dashboard that gives us further information on what is happening. Can you send me logs for when you try to make a donation and get the errors below? You can find the logs under Donations > Tools > Logs.
Also, for the fields not showing up, we need to check for two things: 1. cache; 2. conflicts.
Cache
The fix here is a bit technical so I’ll include as much detail as possible, but you may need to reach out to your web developer or web support person to implement these recommendations.
Your issue here can be caused by some caching happening somewhere in the process. If you’re not familiar with caching, it’s a method of saving server resources by storing copies of a page, resource, query, or site so that the next visitor’s visit doesn’t trigger a call to the server at all, they just get the copy that was saved. Basically, instead of the site needing to recreate the page from scratch, it sends up a copy which allows it to load faster.
We put together this deep dive into what caching is and how it can cause problems: https://givewp.com/documentation/resources/caching/
Caching works really well for speeding up sites, but when a saved copy of the site has sensitive information in it (like donor info) it’s important that GiveWP not share that with the next visitor. If GiveWP is not convinced that the browser requesting the data is the correct one, it defaults to not showing the data.
Caching is handled differently on various sites and web hosts. This could mean a caching plugin, or caching could be in a security solution. Hosting providers also have settings for caching at the server level, and they can help make adjustments for you there. Most caching solutions have a setting or section for excluding specific URLs or parts of URLs (called “slugs”) from caching. At the very least, you should exclude the following slugs from caching:
/donations/
/donation-confirmation/
/donor-dashboard/
*any page with a donation form on it
Also, the following query strings (if your caching solution has a setting for them):
give-embed=donor-dashboard
giveDonationFormInIframe=1
Your host or the caching plugin/solution you are using can help with that. Some of them may require what’s called a “wildcard” like /donations/* to capture all subdirectories under the /donations/ folder.
Some folks prefer to customize the URLs to their site pages, so you may find that your URLs don’t have the slugs mentioned above, even though they contain the same content. In cases like those, we recommend whitelisting the page, not just the slug, that way the pages with those essential pieces of information are still excluded from caching. This is especially important for URLs of pages with donation forms on them.
One helpful tip: Check in with your hosting provider. Most hosts have caching at the server level, and they will be able to adjust this for you. You can also temporarily disable caching on the site to confirm that the uncached site isn’t showing the problem.?
Many security solutions include options for caching as well, so be sure to give those settings a look.
While fine-tuning cache falls outside the scope of the support we’re able to provide, your success with online donations is our number one priority, and we’re happy to provide any tips.
I know this was quite a bit of information to share. If you have any questions about this, let me know, I’m happy to help.
Conflict
In this case, I suggest you follow our troubleshooting tutorials using Health Check. It allows you to isolate plugins and change themes for administrator, while the frontend still runs the live version of the website.
You can see the documentation here:https://givewp.com/documentation/resources/troubleshoot-wordpress-websites-health-check/https://givewp.com/documentation/resources/how-to-troubleshoot-your-website-like-a-wordpress-support-engineer/
Looking forward to helping you get to the bottom of this!
