Sunday, January 27, 2013

What's New on Kiva 1/27 - PHP update, a tidier basket and more

PHP Upgrade

Our main programming language is PHP. We recently performed a major upgrade from version 5.2 to 5.4. The upgrade was a long process that involved a lot of our engineers. It will all be worthwhile as 5.4 offers many benefits over 5.2 and allows us greater flexibility with our development. 

Basket Credit Tidy Up

To help readability and reduce confusion, we've modified the placement and logic of the "Available Kiva Credit" that appears on the My Basket and Review & Pay pages. We previously displayed the user's total available Kiva credit that they had prior to completion of the transaction, regardless of whether any/all of that credit was being applied to the current basket.

The new implementation does two things:

1) Moves this information to the left side of the page. Because the information is not relevant to the specific transaction, it did not make sense to have it in line with the order total / transaction details.

2) Rather than show the Total Available Kiva Credit, we now only show the remaining Kiva credit that has not been applied to the transaction.


Estimated Repayments Graph



You can visualize the estimated repayments to your portfolio with the Estimated Repayments Graph. We have now added the ability to see how much of your repayment will be promotional credit such as Bonuses, which will be returned to the promotion’s sponsor upon repayment.

Have questions about Kiva site improvements? Send them our way at blog@kiva.org.