Add PayPal Order Description to Forminator Payment Form

The current version (1.24.1) of Forminator form builder for WordPress does not set a payment description for Paypal transactions. This is a problem for my client, because they need to know where the money comes from. So I create a custom solution. You can find a link to my solution, a WP mu-plugin below. If you use it please leave a comment on this blog post.

There are 2 different solutions mentioned in the Plugins Support Forum. More on that later. But they are not what I want.

What I want, is for the payment description to be set to the name of the form, by default, without requiring additions steps or settings. Having to remember extra steps every time I set up a form is problematic, when I don’t set forms up very often. It’s just too easy for me to forget.

My solution is a WordPress Must Use Plugin, like the others. Since a Form’s Name is not available in the backend on the form submit, I grab the forms URL. The URL can be used to produce a string very similar to the form name. Close enough so my client can review the PayPal transactions and see which form the money comes from.

You can get a copy my solution called forminator-paypal-description-from-url.php, a WordPress mu-plugin from Github, here:

To install it, just copy the forminator-paypal-description-from-url.php file to your /wp-content/mu-plugins/ folder. If you don’t have a /mu-plugins/ folder, just create one under /wp-content/

forminator-paypal-description-from-url.php runs every time the user clicks the PayPal payment button in Forminator. It grabs the URL, shorten it to just the path, and cleans it up a bit. Then the description is added it to the Orders purchase_units.

For example, the payment form at https://kimballrexford.com/trailsnh-sticker-shop/ will product a description of “Trailsnh Sticker Shop”. The resulting Orders purchase_units look like this:

 {
    "intent": "CAPTURE",
    "purchase_units": [
        {
            "amount": {
                "currency_code": "USD",
                "value": "18.20"
            },
            "description": "Trailsnh Sticker Shop"
        }
    ]
}

More about the PayPal API Orders spec can be found at https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/orders/v2/

If you use forminator-paypal-description-from-url.php please leave me a comment below. Thanks.