io8 Greeting Card Designer

io8 Greeting Card Designer is a standalone, non-commerce greeting card creator for WordPress. It does not require WooCommerce and does not sell or deliver cards. Add your own card artwork in WordPress, organise designs into categories, and let visitors create a personalised card directly on your site. Features include:

• Card Designs custom post type for your artwork.
• Hierarchical Card Categories with front-end filtering.
• Independently editable Heading, Message and Closing.
• Independent font, size, colour, bold, italic and alignment controls.
• Drag-and-drop positioning for each text block.
• Undo and redo.
• Centre alignment guide and snapping.
• Zoom controls.
• Choice of inside-card paper colours.
• Finished-card preview.
• Responsive desktop and mobile editor.
• High-resolution PNG download.
• Automatic creation of a Greeting Card Designer page on first activation.
• Shortcode [io8_greeting_card_designer] for use on additional pages.

The free plugin is intentionally focused on creating and downloading cards. It does not contain the commercial Pro functionality such as WooCommerce sales, greeting library, recipient addressing, fulfilment, digital delivery, email/WhatsApp delivery, scheduled delivery, animated card opening, celebration effects, or credit/card-pack integrations. The plugin does not contact io8 or any other external service during normal operation. Development source: The distributed JavaScript is human-readable. A matching uncompressed source copy is included at assets/js/designer.src.js; no build step is required. Card editing and PNG generation happen in the visitor's browser using locally loaded plugin code and the card images stored on your WordPress site. An optional plain-text io8 credit can be enabled by the site administrator in Card Designs > Settings. It is disabled by default and is not required for the plugin to function.

1. Upload the plugin ZIP through Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin, or install it from the WordPress Plugin Directory.
2. Activate io8 Greeting Card Designer.
3. The plugin creates a published page named "Greeting Card Designer" containing the designer shortcode.
4. Go to Card Designs > Categories to create any categories you want, such as Birthday, Wedding or New Baby.
5. Go to Card Designs > Add New, enter a design name, choose its categories, and set the card artwork as the Featured Image.
6. Publish the design.
7. Open the automatically created Greeting Card Designer page to test the public experience.

You can also place [io8_greeting_card_designer] on any other page or post.

2.5.1

• Restored the original [io8_greeting_card_designer] shortcode for backward compatibility.
• No other functional changes.

2.5.0

• Addressed WordPress.org pre-review feedback.
• Moved admin CSS to an enqueued stylesheet.
• Standardised WordPress identifiers on the io8gcd prefix.
• Added human-readable JavaScript source and corrected contributor metadata.

2.4.3

• Updated the WordPress.org text domain and plugin folder to match the assigned io8-greeting-card-designer slug.

2.4.2

• Updated plugin metadata for WordPress.org submission.
• Removed duplicate Author URI header.

2.4.0

• Prepared the Free edition for WordPress.org submission.
• Removed io8 branding from downloaded card images.
• Made the optional public io8 credit disabled by default and administrator opt-in only.
• Updated plugin metadata and readme for WordPress 7.1.
• Hardened Designer Settings form handling.
• Documented privacy/external-service behaviour and the Free/Pro scope clearly.

2.3.0

• Automatically creates the Greeting Card Designer page on first activation.
• Added Designer Page settings and quick setup links.

2.2.1

• Added an admin-only Upgrade to Pro information page.

2.2.0

• Added Card Categories and public category filtering.

2.1.0

• Added direct text editing, undo/redo, smart centre guides, zoom, inside paper colours, finished-card preview and high-resolution PNG download.

2.0.0

• Rebuilt the Free edition as a standalone non-commerce greeting card creator.