Adding a Paypal Donate Widget to Show Page Sidebar

Hi @sgtech, if your WordPress theme has a setting to toggle on/off a sidebar, it should work on any post type, including Shows from Radio Station. See this page: https://avlhms.com/show/avlhms-mixed-by-dj-tony-z/ You’ll see there is a sidebar present that is added to the post type by the theme itself.

A lot of people are moving to Patreon for donations. It’s just a better experience all around and you can use the Patreon system to communicate with your donors. You may want to consider moving to Patreon instead of PayPal. We offer a Patreon setting to add your link in the plugin Settings.

I understand PayPal may be preferred, but I’m not sure we are going to support it. You can always add a Paypal Donate widget to your sidebar. Or, you can add a PayPal button to the body of your Show page.

In terms of “Listen to the most recent show” text, when you add your link to your show stream, the audio player will appear in the left sidebar. We can’t add that text, because there are over 1,000 active users of Radio Station and all of them may use that feature for something different.

What I would do, is use your blog posts and assign a post to a Show with your latest show embedded as a SoundCloud, Mixcloud embed or an mp3 uploaded or linked to from a CDN to display the WordPress media player in the post page.

In our future PRO version, we plan to add Episodes and Segments and you’ll be able to convert your POSTS assigned to shows to the post type of Episode and then make sure your Episodes are congruent however you need them to be.

We were anticipating that PRO would be out by now, but due to the global pandemic and all the work we’ve been doing to shore up Radio Station since we took it over in June of 2019, we haven’t been able to rev out of first release, but we are working on getting there and hope to have PRO out in the next 45 to 60 days.

After looking at your request again, maybe we can add a text field in the Settings box to display some text above the player. Not sure. In my next meeting with Tony Hayes, our lead developer, we’ll discuss and see if there’s a good use case beyond just a single request for that. We have to make sure that every minute we spend on a feature enhancement doesn’t take away from our development roadmap. But, we also want to make sure our users are heard and that we thoroughly vet their requests. Please stay tuned.

Cheers, Tony. Thanks for the detailed response. I do use Patreon, but I also allow my listeners to “sponsor” songs. In other words, when they make a request they donate a couple bucks via Paypal to help pay for the purchase of the music. It’s not the end of the world if it’s not possible, I just thought I would try to make further use of that page. ??

Scott

@sgtech I spoke to our lead developer last night about your feature request. Weren’t going to be able to add it as a feature in the plugin, but we are going ad d ass a filter you can you add to your functions.php file in a child theme. Then you can add some text and style it the way you need to. You’re the only one so far requesting this feature for now, so it’s less work to add a filter than it is to add it to Settings and then add the php and CSS to the plugin in the left sidebar for the Show page. It won’t come til 2.3.4 is out. That could be next week or the week after. Does that work for you?

A followup thought on this, maybe could add a filter for a more generic “Tip” icon.
That way the link could be set to a Paypal Donate URL for example, but possibly some other payment method also.

@majick That’s a simple solution I never considered, because I thought the Patreon URL was hard coded for the first part and then text field was just for the account name. But yeah, that would probably be beneficial. We could also say, “Add your Patreon, PayPal, or other tipping URL to this field.

But, what about an image for the entered URL? We could just update it to say choose Patreon or PayPal and then load an image for their selection, so it’s not just a text link. Or, can we detect the URL and set the image based on that?