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Appeal portal instructions

This thread explains briefly the set up for APPEAL/APPEALDISPLAY/APPEALTHUMB portals.

Firstly what are they all about?

An APPEAL portal describes a fund raising target and how payments may be made towards that target. An appeal may operate in real money using paypal as a means of payment or in "virtual" forum currency, using "CASH" or another profile field that you have created.

The APPEALDISPLAY/APPEALTHUMB portals actually show the APPEAL, you can create as many APPEALDISPLAY portals as you like all showing one appeal. The defaults simply provide one large view on an APPEAL showing the donation form, and one "thumbnail" view that shows a basic progress graphic and links to the large view.

So let us work through constructing an appeal.

There is an assumption here that you are familiar with portal settings in the admin panel, and also know that you can edit template files including the portal template files.


Firstly we edit the APPEAL portal settings.



The first field you can fill in is "Appeal Id" This is very important as it will be used as a name to identity all the donations made to this APPEAL and to link any APPEALDISPLAY portals back to this appeal. Set it once and then never change it unless you want to lose the stored information.

Most of the rest here is self explanatory, though it is worth noting that setting the "Allow Guests" to donate option will only work with a real money appeal.

If you are running a real money appeal using paypal then setting a minimum donation is sensible, otherwise for very small donations are very large percentage of the money will be claimed by paypal. In the UK I tend to set the minimum at £2 which means the paypal charge is about 15%.

Looking further down the setting we see:




These setting are all about the payment options, starting off with whether the portal is operation as a "virtual" system using a profile field as the currency, or a real system using payal.

For a virtual system you should refer to:

http://howtodoit.myfreeforum.org/about719.html&highlight=cash

and other CASH related searches for how to give your members virtual currency to spend.

For paypal the two fields you must set correctly are the email address of the paypal account to receive money, and the appropriate currency code. For dollars this is USD for pounds GBP, for other currencies you should check in your paypal account.

At this point is it worth pointing out a couple of things.

1) We accept no liability for anything what so ever to do with paypal transactions.
2) We do not make any charges for using paypal. Any transaction fees will be paypals.

The options following allow debug information to be emailed to you, and for additional information to be displayed about the transaction if need be. The IPN email will send the information that paypal gives when it notifies (Instant Payment Notification) the APPEAL portal of the transaction. The PDT email will send the information that paypal gives when the user is returned to the APPEAL portal.  You may find the IPN email a useful logging device, the PDT email really contains little of use, but might be needing for diagnostics if there is a problem occurring when someone tries to donate.

You will also see the option "Record Gross Donation". This lets you decide whether you want your appeal to reflect the reality of paypal fees or not. e.g. Will a donation of say £2 be records as £1.73 due to the 27p paypal charge.

Lastly we have the option for you to email the donar a thank you email. Bear in mind paypal will have emailed them as well.

Setting the APPEALDISPLAY

Now we have an appeal we can move on to showing it. You will see two preset APPEALDISPLAY portal components, one called APPEALDISPLAY and the other called APPEALTHUMB. We define two to start with as you will probably want a small display of an appeals progress in one place, and another showing sponsors and allowing donations elsewhere.
We will look at the settings you might have in APPEALTHUMB as they are a little more complex.




The key setting here is the "Appeal Id" the variable that must be the same in the APPEAL and any APPEALDISPLAY for that APPEAL.

The "published" setting allows you to hide an APPEALDISPLAY whilst you are developing it. The rest of the parameters are largely self explanatory and in the screen shot you see we elect to hide the sponsers, the donation form and even the title as this is a thumbnail view. As a matter of fact when you see this appeal on this forum, you will see a title. This is because the following code is used when showing the APPEALTHUMB portal.

Code:

<span class="corners-bottom"><span></span></span></div></div>
<div class="forabg">
<div class="inner"><span class="corners-top"><span></span></span>
<ul class="topiclist">
<li class="header">
      <dl class="lastpost" >
            <dt>Server&nbsp;Appeal</dt>
      </dl>
</li>
</ul>
<ul class="widelist forums">   
<li class="row"><dl class="lastpost" >   <dt>
{MYFF.APPEALTHUMB}</dt>
</dl></li></ul>
<span class="corners-bottom"><span></span></span></div></div


In essence in the template used on the support forum, there is a lot of special code for the borders and it makes more sense to code around the APPEALTHUMB portal template file cms_appealthumb.tpl than to alter the cms_appealthumb.tpl file to match the template.

As such we turn off the title display and manually edit it in to overall_header.tpl along with the border code.

The next options are especially relevant to the thumbnail view.




We need to let people get from the thumbnail view to where they can either donate and/or see a list of sponsors.

If you give text and a link in either of these field groups, then it will be shown. In our example we have created a web page that does show both sponsors and allow donations, so we have just entered one link/text to cover both options. In the APPEALDISPLAY portal where we show both sponsors and donations we leave the fields blank.

Next on, the images for the appeal need defining. Each appeal needs an array of images covering the amount of money raised from o% to 100%.




The first option "Mask Image" allows you to run an appeal where people will not be able (unless they know the real filenames) to see any images used in the appeal that are for more than the current total raised.

The following fields are covered in a separate help topic:

http://forum.myfreeforum.org/sutra120103.php

But allow you to use our supplied appeal image sets, or to use your own that you can upload to a forum template.

Any images supplied can be set to show at a size you desire, the system will have bandwidth by creating images of that size on the server. Note that transparency may be lost in this process.

The next options control animation of the appeal graphic:



You can select whether animation occurs and how fast. Note that your users must allow javascript to see the animation in action.

The final settings are sundry details about what should be shown in the cms_appealthumb.tpl template.



You will note that you can give a css style that will be used by the template, which brings us on to the whole subject of the APPEALDISPLAY template itself.

When you show the APPEALTHUMB portal, the system will create a cms_appealthumb.tpl for you based on the systems cms_appealdisplay.tpl template.

The cms_appealdisplay.tpl is quite long and complex, close to 400 lines at the moment in fact. Let us examine a small part of the file:

Code:

<!-- IF APPEALDISPLAY_S_SHOW_SPONSORS == 1 && APPEALDISPLAY_S_MODE == "display" && APPEALDISPLAY_SPONSOR_COUNT > 0 -->
<tr><td><span class="{APPEALDISPLAY_TEXTSTYLE}">Thank you to the following sponsors</span></td></tr>
<tr>
<td><table>
<th>Username</th><th>Amount</th><th>Guest name</th>
<th>Date</th>
<!-- IF APPEALDISPLAY_S_SHOW_MEMO -->
<th>Memo</th>
<!-- ENDIF -->

</tr>
<!-- BEGIN appealdisplay_sponsors -->
<tr><td>
<span class="{APPEALDISPLAY_TEXTSTYLE}">{appealdisplay_sponsors.USERNAME}</span></td>
<td><span class="{APPEALDISPLAY_TEXTSTYLE}">{APPEALDISPLAY_CURRENCYSYMBOL}{appealdisplay_sponsors.AMOUNT}</span></td>
<td><span class="{APPEALDISPLAY_TEXTSTYLE}">{appealdisplay_sponsors.GUESTNAME}</span></td>
<td><span class="{APPEALDISPLAY_TEXTSTYLE}">{appealdisplay_sponsors.DATE}</span></td>
<!-- IF APPEALDISPLAY_S_SHOW_MEMO -->
<td><span class="{APPEALDISPLAY_TEXTSTYLE}">{appealdisplay_sponsors.MEMO}</span></td>
<!-- ENDIF -->


</td></tr>
<!-- END appealdisplay_sponsors -->
</tr></table></td></tr>
<!-- ELSEIF APPEALDISPLAY_SPONSORLINK != "" && APPEALDISPLAY_SPONSORTEXT != "" -->
<tr><td><a class="topictitle" href="{APPEALDISPLAY_SPONSORLINK}">{APPEALDISPLAY_SPONSORTEXT}</a></td></tr>
<!-- ELSE -->
<!-- <tr><td>no sponsor link</td></tr> -->
<!-- ENDIF -->


The section above handles the display of sponsors.

You can see an "<!--IF" statements that ask whether we want to show sponsors, and also whether the template is currently in "display" mode rather than in another mode like "checkout"

You can also see references to {APPEALDISPLAY_TEXTSTYLE} which will be the CSS class defined in the APPEALTHUMB portal.

The template will work for a lot of people as it stands, but you can edit it to make it work better for you. For example adding:

Code:

<td><span class="{APPEALDISPLAY_TEXTSTYLE}">{appealdisplay_sponsors.WWW}</span></td>
<td><span class="{APPEALDISPLAY_TEXTSTYLE}">{appealdisplay_sponsors.AVATAR}</span></td>
<td><span class="{APPEALDISPLAY_TEXTSTYLE}">&pound;{appealdisplay_sponsors.CASH}</span></td>


in the "appealdisplay_sponsors" would show more about the sponsors. The possibilities are endless.
admin (no pm's please)

bumped to prompt comment.

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