Do you want to add Crowdfunding capabilities on your WordPress website hosted by WP Engine? If so, this tutorial will show you how to add and enable the Thrinacia Atlas WordPress plugin on your WordPress website.
Please note that normally Thrinacia Atlas can run in standalone mode or with standalone UI that we host for you as part of the subscription plan, but if for some reason you have existing WP Engine website and want to run the crowdfunding section there, then this blog may be for you.
Below are the steps that it takes to add a full white label Crowdfunding platform on your WordPress website while using WP Engine.
Step 1. Subscribe to the Atlas subscription plan
Go to the pricing page on Thrinacia’s website, and choose the plan that best suits your needs. Upon purchasing the subscription plan, you can begin to build the Crowdfunding platform. For this example, we are going to use Thrinacia’s demo website called Origin.
Step 2. Log into the WordPress website, and download the Thrinacia Atlas WordPress plugin
Go to the administrator dashboard, click on the plugins option in the left side menu, and click on add new. Search for Thrinacia, and the Thrinacia Atlas WordPress plugin should appear as shown in the below image.
Install, and activate the plugin.
Step 3. Save the permalink settings and add the page path
In the left menu, go to settings, and click on the permalinks option. On the permalinks settings page, enable the post name option and save the settings.
This will allow you to set the path for the page that you want to use for your Crowdfunding platform.
Add the path you would like the page to be hosted on by clicking on the settings item in the left menu and clicking on Thrinacia Atlas option. Add the path that you would like the page to be called. For this demo, we will adding fundraising as the path name.
Once you have added the path and saved, you will see that a new page has been added by going to pages in the left menu.
As you can see, the new page that was added has the same path as you set in the Thrinacia Atlas settings.
Step 4. Create the app_local.js file
Go to your website. In the browser, add the following (/app_local.js) behind the site URL you are using for your Atlas subscription plan, and click enter. For this example, we are using the Origin demo website, so the URL will look like this https://origin.thrinacia.com/app_local.js
Copy the text that you see on that page, and create a new file in a code editor. Paste the content into that file, and save the file as app_local.js.
Step 5. Access the site files using SFTP
Go to the WP Engine administrator dashboard, click on the sites option in the top navigation. Select the site you are using. Add a new user to access the files. Enter the credentials into your SFTP program. For this demo, we are using FileZilla.
You want to add the app_local.js file into the Angular folder. To find the Angular folder, click on the following directories root/wp-content/plugins/thrinacia-atlas-crowdfunding. In this directory, you will see the angular folder. Drag and drop the app_local.js file into the angular folder.
Step 6. Rename, and relocate the angular folder
As WP Engine does not permit symlinks, in order to activate Thrinacia Atlas WordPress plugin, you will have to re-locate the angular folder, and rename it to the path that you set in the WordPress administration settings as per the image below:
Go back to the SFTP program, right click on the angular folder, and rename the file to the path that you set. Once you have renamed the folder to the path that you set, you need to relocate/move that folder to the root directory. You can see in the below image where to move the folder. When using FileZilla, you can move the folder by clicking on it and dragging it to the root folder which has ( / ).
Step 7. Contact WP Engine support to remove 429 rate limiting
WP Engine has restrictions when it comes to sending more requests in shorter amount of time. This has to be manually removed by a support engineer. To do this, you can simply go to the WP Engine dashboard, click on the live support option, and ask them to remove 429 status code rate limiting, otherwise, you will receive the http 429 status code errors as shown on the browser console as per below.
angular.js:9893 GET https://thrinacia.wpengine.com/crowdfunding/views/translation/en/campaign-preview.json 429 angular.js:9893 GET https://thrinacia.wpengine.com/crowdfunding/views/translation/en/guest-contribution.json 429 angular.js:9893 GET https://thrinacia.wpengine.com/crowdfunding/views/translation/en/campaign-management.json 429 angular.js:9893 GET https://thrinacia.wpengine.com/crowdfunding/views/translation/en/pledge-history.json 429 angular.js:9893 GET https://thrinacia.wpengine.com/crowdfunding/views/translation/en/pledge-campaign.json 429 angular.js:9893 GET https://thrinacia.wpengine.com/crowdfunding/views/translation/en/message-center.json 429 angular.js:9893 GET https://thrinacia.wpengine.com/crowdfunding/views/translation/en/payment-setting.json 429 angular.js:9893 GET https://thrinacia.wpengine.com/crowdfunding/views/translation/en/stream-management.json 429
This will allow you to fully run the Atlas UI on your WordPress website while using the WP Engine as the host. There is, however, another additional step which you can take to fully optimize the Crowdfunding experience. You may want to share the site, and the site links on social media or other instances. This next step will allow you to have proper pre-rendering and indexing on search engines.
Step 8. Setting up optional pre-rendering for crawling and indexing
You may also need the correct pre-rendering setup for crawlers from google, facebook, slack, bing, and other places. This ensures your website is indexed correctly in search engines and links can be shared on social media websites. Since you are hosting WordPress on WP Engine, you need to proxy traffic to our pre-rendering cluster.
To get this setup please open a support ticket on nexus.thrinacia.com under your project so we can quickly set this up for you. Our existing set of rules is compatible with nginx and apache web servers. Please note that SSH Access may be needed.
You can watch the below video to learn more about adding the WordPress plugin on your WP Engine website: