How to use the optional Thrinacia Atlas WordPress Crowdfunding plugin on a Digital Ocean hosted website

Using the Atlas WordPress plugin on your Digital Ocean hosted website
Using the Atlas WordPress plugin on your Digital Ocean hosted website

Do you want to add Crowdfunding capabilities on your WordPress website hosted by Digital Ocean? 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 Digital Ocean 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 Digital Ocean.

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.

New Atlas Subscription plans Thrinacia UI
Atlas subscription plan options

Step 2. Use Digital Ocean to create and host the WordPress website

Either create or log into your Digital Ocean account. Next, click on the green “create” button on the top of the page to create a new WordPress website, and click on the droplets option to create new cloud servers.

Create button in Digital Ocean dashboard
Create button in Digital Ocean dashboard

Fill out the page with the appropriate content as shown in the image below:

Create new droplet page
Create new droplet page

You will want to click on the marketplace tab and click on WordPress for the one-click install of WordPress. As you can see, you can choose where the servers are located. This will in turn help with the speed of your website. For example, if you live in Australia, and choose to host your website in the servers in that location, then the website will load faster for you. This is a great feature for those that want to really optimize their website.

The additional options and features as shown in the above image are all up to you. For this example, we will be using a standard plan with no add ons. Choose the options that are going to best suit your needs for your website.

After you click on create, you should see the following:

New Droplet
New Droplet

Click on the droplet, SSH into the new site by using the credentials on the below page to create a new WordPress website

Droplet page
Droplet page

Use the IP address provided in the top right corner of the page, and root as the user for when you SSH into the website. Open your terminal and SSH into the site:

Type the commant root@YOUR_IP_Address and the password Provided in the Digital Ocean email
Type the command root@YOUR_IP_Address and the password Provided in the Digital Ocean email

Digital Ocean will have sent you an email with the password needed to SSH into the website.

Terminal for creating a new WordPress website
Terminal for creating a new WordPress website
Finishing the terminal SSH process
Finishing the terminal SSH process

Go to the new URL, and follow the instructions for creating your new WordPress website.

Choose your language
Choose your language
Creating the new WordPress website
Fill in the fields
New site provided
New site provided

Step 3. 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.

Downloading the Thrinacia Atlas WordPress plugin
Use the Thrinacia Atlas WordPress option on the left

Install, and activate the plugin.

The plugin is installed, and activated
The plugin is installed and activated

Step 4. 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.

Saving the permalinks settings
Saving the permalinks 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.

Setting the page path
Set the page path. For this example, it is set to fundraising

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.

New page added
New page added

As you can see, the new page that was added has the same path as you set in the Thrinacia Atlas settings.

Step 5. 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

Thrinacia Origin app_local.js file
Thrinacia Origin app_local.js file

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.

app_local.js file
app_local.js file

Step 6. Access the site files using SFTP and add the app_local.js file

Use the same credentials that you received for accessing the site via SSH

  • Hostname: The IP address given
  • User: root
  • Password: The password provided in the email that you changed in the terminal.
  • Port: 22

Enter the credentials into your SFTP program. For this demo, we are using FileZilla.

Entering the credentials for the Vultr website into the FileZilla program.
Entering the credentials for the Digital Ocean website into the FileZilla program.

You want to add the app_local.js file into the Angular folder. To find the Angular folder, click on the following directories root/var/html/www/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.

Locating the angular folder
Locating the angular folder

Step 7. 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 Digital Ocean, 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 Digital Ocean website: