D&R Canal Watch
A nonprofit's donation form could not take a credit card. I traced it to two settings, fixed the form, and the one-off fix turned into a monthly retainer.
- Client
- D&R Canal Watch
- Where
- New Jersey
- Year
- 2026
- My role
- Developer, now on monthly retainer
- Work type
- Maintenance, Rescues and fixes, WordPress development
- Live site
- canalwatch.org
- That became a monthly retainer
- 1 fix
The situation
D&R Canal Watch is a New Jersey nonprofit that supports the Delaware & Raritan Canal State Park. Their previous webmaster could not do what they needed, and the problem was urgent: a couple wanted to donate $5,000 by credit card and the donation form would not let them.
Instead of card fields, the form showed iDEAL, Venmo and PayPal Credit buttons. iDEAL is a Dutch payment method, and the organization did not want it there in the first place.
What I did
Before touching any code I traced the problem. The PayPal account was already approved for card processing, and there was no custom CSS hiding anything. The cause was the form’s PayPal field: Credit Card was switched off and “Display Other Payment Buttons” was switched on. Two settings.
- Turned card payments back on and removed the extra payment buttons.
- Added an open “Other Amount” field and renamed the section from Membership to Donation Amount.
- Removed the iDEAL instructions, fixed a broken footer email link and updated the copyright year.
- Started a site-specific plugin so future fixes never touch the theme. Its first module handles form spam.
- Ran a full site audit and priced the remaining work as clear, separate packages.