As you know, we try & get our customers involved in the development process as much as possible. This helps us start a conversation & listen to ideas & feedback & help come out with better releases. As part of this initiative, we have our series of "Subscriber Connect" Newsletters & Blogs which keeps you abreast of what we are developing next.

We have just begun the development of JGive 1.6 which includes a lot of features that you have been asking for! Let's take a quick walkthrough these features. We would like you to join the discussion by commenting on this blog. We also have some specific questions for you & it would be great if you could answer those for us!

Planned Features for JGive v1.6

Awesome new Pin Layout for Campaigns & Kickstarter like Campaign display page option

You have been asking for Kickstarter like layouts for a while now. This version brings you an awesome Pin type display for Campaigns & a completely new way to show the campaign display page just like Kickstarter!

PayPal adaptive payments to make Fees much easier! 

A lot of our products which are essentially multi-vendor like JGive, JTicketing & now Quick2Cart let the administrator charge a per transaction service fee. Now with most gateways, this means that the Admin has to receive all the payments, cut his fee from it & then transfer the balance over to the Event/Campaign owner. PayPal Adaptive payments let us do Split Parallel payments instantly. Which means if the Donor is making a Donation/ Investment of 200$ & the fees owed to the site owner are 20$, then we can make instant payments of 180$ to the campaign owner & 20$ to the Admin for his fee. Note that this feature will only be available for the Paypal payment gateway.

This is a comparatively complex feature & wouldn’t have made it this early into JGive if it wasn’t for some commercial supporters who have sponsored some part of this development so that it could be done earlier. Thanks, guys!

Recurring Donations with PayPal

Another feature that was much awaited is the ability to do recurring donations. We will be implementing this with PayPal to start with & in later versions, depending on demand extend it to other supported payment gateways.

One Page Checkout

Any kind of e-commerce transaction should be dead easy - then be it checking out from a Shop or making a donation or an investment. The One Page Checkout feature will let your donors do donations much more quickly without having to go through multiple pages of checkout.

Donors & Donations Display Module

Using this module, you can show various types of JGive data on any page you want! The module has multiple modes as below

• My Donations - Donations of logged in users
• Recent donations on site
• Top donations (maximum amount) against the campaign by the single donor
• Overall top donors

Campaign Display Module

This multi-purpose module will let you show campaigns in various ways as below.

• Featured Campaigns
• Recent Campaigns
• Campaigns expiring soon
• Completed Campaigns

Campaign Image Gallery

Impress your donors/investors by maintaining an awesome campaign image gallery! Lets you add multiple images to the campaign & show them in a nice gallery layout with lightbox effects.

CB campaigns Plugin

Though tightly integrated with CB, JGive was missing a plugin to let a user show his JGive campaigns on his profile page. This release will make this available.

Group Donations Support for JomSocial

One of the most requested features is finally here. Now you can tie in your campaign with your JomSocial groups & also show it to the Group. Now you can start doing Group specific campaigns or investments!

Other Features

• Let the admin edit campaigns from the Joomla Backend
• Ability to create a Menu for a single JGive campaign
• Allow jGive form to be extended via plugins
• Full Documented Plugin API of all triggers available in JGive
• Router for jGive for better SEF URLs
• Redirect to language-specific PayPal page

Questions for the Community

1. In case of Investments, do you need any kind of Tax management if so what? VAT?
2. Do donations incur any taxation in any of your countries?
3. What kind of invoicing is needed in case of Donations & Investments?
4. Pledge & Pay - The ability to Pledge a donation & Auto Pay only if the Campaign is completed. Do you think this is an important feature to have? Would you be willing to sponsor this feature to help release it faster? ( As of now, this is scheduled for version 1.8 which is at least 6-8 months out) 

What next?

Jump on to the discussion by commenting on this Blog. Tell us which features excite you the most, what do you think should have more priority, suggest any new features you think should have been covered & of course, answer our questions. All this will help make this a democratic process & help you get what you want in this & the next releases. Every comment counts!