Stripe‐powered donation pages

Some upfront facts

• We rely on Stripe as a payment provider (for card payments).
• We used to use PayPal for similar solutions and switched to Stripe in early 2024 (for cheaper and more agile).
• We use no code Stripe services wherever possible.
• We use use some customisation wherever needed.
• Stripe does not support name-your-price recurring payments (i.e., the price of a recurring payment needs to be pre-defined and the user cannot edit the amount).

Basic architecture for recurring donation for show hosts

1. Backend (in this repo): creates custom checkout session by submitting the show's name as metadata (see plugin code here).
2. Frontend (see in this repo): calls backend as Wordpress API to return checkout page (see code here).

Some details

• As the backend API call is implemented as a GET request, the show host parameter is sent through as a name-value pair in the request URL.
• Some environment variables are used to configure the exact behaviour of backend and frontend:
  • Backend: for example, the cancel page URL is the site that is jumped to when the user hits back on the checkout page; see all backend-side environment variables here.
  • Frontend: there is currently single environment variable in use here (SUBSCRIPTION_CANCEL_URL), which defines the URL of the so called customer portal for users to cancel their subscriptions (see frontend environment variable file here).