Jonathan Goldford

Thanks for the honest feedback @it-hertz. We always appreciate it, even when it’s not the most favorable.

For some of the features you listed, you’re exactly right that they’ve been requested in the past and haven’t been implemented. The biggest reason for this is time. Since the plugin is free to use, the work we put into it often has to take a backseat to our nonprofit clients. I know that’s not always ideal, but as a small team, it’s a tradeoff we have to make.

It’s somewhat hard to hear you say that many of these features would be easy to implement. For example, something like offering volunteer time slots could potentially be really helpful, but it would require a massive investment of time. Here’s an example of some areas we’d need to consider:

• What changes would be required in the custom database tables to make this work?
• What documentation updates would be needed so those new to the plugin could easily pick it up and use it?
• How do we handle all the volunteers that signed up before upgrading to the version with this functionality, both in the database and in the admin?
• How does adjusting what shows on the frontend of websites potentially break any custom styling organizations have implemented?

That’s just a few of the questions, but hopefully it gives you an idea of the considerations we’d need to take into account.

That said, the plugin is open source. We’d welcome your contributions or those from others if they’d like to get involved. You can find the plugin’s Github repo at https://github.com/wiredimpact/wired-impact-volunteer-management.

I also wanted to dive into a few specifics you brought up in case they’re helpful for you or others.

One of the missing features is a time slot selector for the volunteer to choose their desired time of service.

At some point down the road it’s possible we’ll add this feature. Until that happens, we’ve heard a number of nonprofits have had success setting up a new volunteer opportunity for each time slot. It does require some duplicated work to create each unique opportunity, but it solves a lot of the problems you mentioned in your review.

Users are assigned the role “Volunteer” when they sign up, so integration with member plugins such as Ultimate Member would be perfect. Or, at least there should be hooks so we can do it with our own functions. Creating a separate UM form just for volunteers is easy, but we’d still need to hook into profile edits (we’d need the ‘I’m available at these times’ dropdown there as well).

We set up the plugin to create users with the “Volunteer” role for exactly the reason you brought up. By making each volunteer a user, you can utilize tons of actions and filters inside of WordPress to modify, adapt or engage with the volunteers. The plugin itself also includes a number of hooks to allow organizations to customize it in whatever ways they’d like. If you see a hook missing where you need it, please let us know. We’re happy to consider adding it.

Finally, I want to mention your use of the phrase “disinterested devs” in this situation is simply not the case. The folks who have worked on this plugin are extremely passionate about the nonprofit community and helping these organizations move their missions forward. Hopefully this is clear from the support forums, where not a single question has gone unanswered over the years. You’re absolutely right that we can’t add every feature, but we’ll continue supporting volunteer-driven organizations, even if that means recommending they use another tool that better meets their needs.

If there’s anything else we can help with, just let us know.

Thanks for outlining all these details @ashewebmaster. We completely agree that you shouldn’t have to disable ModSecurity to use the plugin and we don’t want our plugin to cause errors either.

What we’ve struggled with is replicating the problem. During our testing we’ve never been able to see the issue you’re describing, even though we know it exists for a very small group of users. If we knew exactly what was causing the problem, we could hopefully fix it.

I know you already mentioned reaching out to InMotion to solve the problem, but I wonder if they could provide you the logs specific to ModSecurity. Those would likely be in a different place than your website’s more global error logs. Once we get more details and figure out the cause, we can work through implementing a fix within the plugin’s code.

Thanks a ton for the help in resolving this one.

Since we haven’t heard back from you in a little bit I’ll go ahead and mark this as resolved.

Don’t hesitate to reach out if any other questions come up in the future.

Thanks for reaching out @greatoldiesdj. Our volunteer management plugin doesn’t offer the ability to duplicate opportunities, but you can add this functionality through a separate plugin. If you haven’t already, I’d suggest checking out the Yoast Duplicate Post plugin. That should give you the functionality you’re looking for.

Good luck and let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks so much for the kind words @calverdigital. It means a lot that you and your client have found the plugin helpful.

Thanks for turning the CSS back on and adjusting the caching so we could see the issue. It looks like the footer is actually sitting on top of the “Sign Up” button, which is causing the issue where you can’t click it. Luckily, this should be a fairly easy fix.

We need to add some CSS code to your website. If you’re not familiar with CSS, the easiest approach to adding the code is by using “Method 1: Adding Custom CSS Using Theme Customizer” within the article at https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-easily-add-custom-css-to-your-wordpress-site/. Here’s the CSS code you need to add:

body.single-volunteer_opp footer#colophon {
  clear: both;
}

Once that code starts working on your site, you should be able to use the plugin’s CSS and click the “Sign Up” button.

Good luck and let me know how it goes.