Search the WordPress plugin repository for a bitcoin donation plugin, you will find tons of them. Unfortunately, most are unusable. Most of them are just leads/ads for a payment gateway. You got to pay them in some way finally even their wordpress plugins are claimed free.
We will not consider the donation plugins for WooCommerce, simply because I do not sell products and I don’t want to install WooCommerce just to add a donation button on my website.
Now, the first plugin shown is “GoUrl Bitcoin Payment Gateway & Paid Downloads & Membership” . You will find you will have to register on their website to get public key/private key for each cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, I could not receive their registration verification email. And I don’t think I need to register their website to use a plugin.
Next is “Cryptocurrency Payment & Donation Box – Accept Payments in any Cryptocurrency on your WP Site for Free”. It requires WordPress version > 4.7, otherwise, you will get this error:
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function get_parent_theme_file_path()
Even after you upgrade your wordpress to higher version, you cannot use the plugin easily. All the options of the plugin are unusable until you fill your “Common Donation ETH Address For Wallets”. Most people are not familiar this terminology. You may mistaken the private key for the address and fill it in the box, then your wallet may be stolen by them.
And you will find you have to activate the plugin once again:
This sounds suspicious.
How to use this plugin? There is no widget for this plugin. You have to add short-codes in your posts manually. I try to add a customize html widget on the sidebar and fill the short-code in it but it does not work. It will show some links on the sidebar but when you click the links, it says no xxx extension found, or just does not respond at all. More suspiciously, under the Add Coins/Tokens menu, you can add many kinds of coins but you find no places to fill an address for the coins.
Then comes the Cryptothanks, it has no widget, either. If you add its short-code [cryptothanks] to the sidebar as a customize HTML widget, it does not work. It just show the text “[cryptothanks]” or other text.
Next is the Easy Bitcoin Donation Widget plugin. After installation and activation, you cannot find it on the left panel of the WordPress admin page to do some settings for it. But the plugin does have a widget in Appearance/Widgets for you to drag/drop to a widget area(such as the primary sidebar). When you add the widget to a widget area, you can do some settings for it such as fill a bitcoin address:
But the widget does not work actually because the service(https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300×300&choe=utf-8&chld=L%7C1&chl=bitcoin%253A) it uses to generate QR code for bitcoin address is not available now.
Last, the BitMate Author Donations plugin. It is the only usable plugin I find till now. The only strange thing about it is that you must fill the bitcoin address in your WordPress profile(not in the plugin’s setting page). Without any settings, the plugin will automatically display after every post. And it has a widget for you to drag/drop on sidebar. The only pity is that there are not many crypto currencies supported: bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, and ZCash.
