6 New Features: Stripe Portal, Spam Protection, and More — July 2024

Welcome back for another roundup of our latest release at Thrive Themes.

In this release, we've added two much-requested features to our Thrive Architect forms: in-built spam protection and a custom number field.

For course creators, Thrive Apprentice now lets you create a Stripe customer portal for your students and members. We've also given you more control over how an assessment contributes to your students' course progress.

Read on to learn more about these exciting features!

Version 10.0...? What does that mean?

Before we get into the new features included in this release, let's talk briefly about some changes happening under-the-hood at Thrive Themes.

The latest release is Version 10.0 across all of our plugins — which those of you with a keen eye will have noticed is a big leap in version numbers from our last, and brings all of Thrive Suite to the same number.

This is a reflection of some significant internal improvements we've been working on.

This is the culmination of a ton of work that we've put into improving our deployment pipelines — that is, the way we can provide you with plugin updates, bug fixes, new features and functionality onto your websites faster, and with less conflicts.

We'll have more news about this later in the year, but we're working to:

We are making this a priority ahead of major updates in our future, because after-all, we know that you are building your businesses with our tools and it's important that we are in the best position help you achieve success.

But enough of that! Let's talk about what is new in version 10.0

1. New CloudFlare Turnstile Spam Prevention

Keeping spam off your website used to be simpler, but now it feels like a constant struggle. 

Google ReCAPTCHA was the go-to option for most business owners, but with Google's recent change to their pricing model, it’s become harder (and more costly) to use effectively.

At the same time, you're seeing more sophisticated bots hit your site every day, filling your database with spammy submissions – which is super frustrating and time-consuming. 

When you look into paid spam protection services, the prices make you cringe. It almost feels like you're being pushed to choose between leaving your site vulnerable or overspending on security. 

And that’s why we’ve ramped up our spam protection functionality to save you a lot of stress, time, and money.

We’ve now integrated with CloudFlare’s Turnstile— a more user-friendly and free alternative to ReCAPTCHA for your website.

Once you follow through the CloudFlare Turnstile setup (which is a thousand times easier than Google ReCAPTCHA), you'll be able to enable Turnstile spam protection on any lead generation forms built with Thrive products.

This will add a spam check through CloudFlare, who are industry leaders in content delivery networks (CDNs), DNS, and Cyber Security. CloudFlare will check visitor signals to see if they match with spam patterns and, if they do, it will block form submission.

But for your human users, they'll see an auto-loading verification check just under your forms where you have it enabled.

But that's not all...

2. Introducing Thrive Spam Protection

If you don't want to use CloudFlare and just need a quick spam solution right out-of-the-gate, we’ve got you covered. We have released our very own native honeypot spam prevention system – Thrive Spam Protection.

And here’s how it works… 

When you are creating a form in our Visual Editor— whether that's in Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads or any of our plugins— under 'spam prevention', you can select 'Thrive Spam Protection'.

You'll notice that on your form... nothing changes.

Behind the scenes, this creates a hidden form field that can't be seen by real users but is visible to bots that may be crawling your site looking to fill in your forms with spam entries.

Those spam bots can't help but interact with those hidden fields, and that's a sure-sign that it wasn't a real user. 

As a result, your Thrive-made lead generation form returns a successful form submission response, so the bot thinks it was successful... when in reality, the form submission is cleverly rejected. 

Both CloudFlare Turnstile and Thrive Spam Protection are GDPR compliant and give you an easier way to protect your forms without having to break the bank.

Thrive Tip: And you can check out this guide to learn how to set up either of these spam protection options on your website.

3. New 'Number' Form Field

We’re excited to share another highly-requested feature: a custom Number field to make collecting numerical data on your forms so much easier.

Here's what you can do with this field. You can:

This new field makes collecting any kind of numerical data really easy. 

From financial figures to survey responses, you'll get the precise numbers you need without the hassle. This form field will reject entries that are not numbers, and will provide error responses if users try to submit numbers that are not within the min/ max.

And yes, it works with our custom field integrations across popular mailing list tools meaning you can pass that data into your service of choice.

It's perfect for everything from generating accurate quotes to analyzing survey results. See this example below, with an up/down increment clicker that helps your visitors enter their chosen value.

Adding a number field to your forms might seem like a small change, but it unlocks a handful of powerful use cases.

Now, when you ask for age, quantity, or any other number, you'll get clean, usable responses without the headache of sorting through text entries or fixing input errors.

This simple feature will save you hours of data cleanup and make your forms much easier for people to fill out. It's all about getting the information you need, hassle-free.

4. Improve Subscription Management with the New Stripe Customer Portal

Managing your online course and membership customers in Thrive Apprentice just became even easier for Stripe users.

If you head to the backend settings in Thrive Apprentice, you’ll see a new feature:

With this feature, you can create a dynamic button (or text link) in Thrive Architect and link it to a Stripe page where your customers can manage their payment and profile details with your business. 

This button will magically be hidden from users that have not bought a product from you through Stripe, and for those that have— it will dynamically link them to their own management portal, with their subscription and card data.

They can cancel or renew their subscriptions, add new credit cards, modify their billing information, and see a list of all of their past invoices.

So how would you use it?

On your course pages or in any custom membership area that you build, you can drop a button on the page and add the dynamic Stripe Customer Portal link, like we have in this example below:

Then, when a customer with an active purchase history or subscription on your website clicks that link, they'll be taken to a secure Stripe management area, off of your website, that looks like this example below.

See how they can edit their card, cancel plan, or update their information? This is all done on Stripe's end where it's very secure, but changes will affect their access to your Thrive Apprentice products.

By giving your customers more control over their subscriptions, you get to save time by not having to handle this aspect of your business yourself.

If a customer needs to verify information with their subscription, or change their payment method, they can easily hop in and do it themselves without needing to consult you.

Neat, right?

Thrive Tip: Learn how to set up your Customer Stripe Portal here.

5. Control How Assessments Contribute To Your Students’ Progress

Course creators, you’re going to love this.

Remember our Assessments Feature? The one which lets you add assessments to your courses in Thrive Apprentice, either as file uploads, video URLs, external links or entire quizzes built with Thrive Quiz Builder?

Yeah, the assessments feature which lets course creators view, grade and provide feedback to their students from an easy-to-use backend assessment inbox.

Isn't it awesome? Here's a view of the backend grading inbox.

Well, up until now, when someone completed an assessment, by default that assessment would immediately count towards progress on their course.

But we've added more flexibility to suit your teaching style and course goals.

Now, you have the power to control how and when an assessment contributes to your students' progress.

You can let assessments count towards student progress with:

This new feature puts you in control of how students progress through your course. 

You decide if credit is earned only for top performance, for every attempt, or simply for submitting work. It's a simple way to reinforce your course goals and keep students on track. 

Whether you want to emphasize quality, effort, or timely completion, you can now easily pick the option that suits you.

And this improvement is laying the foundation for an even more powerful feature coming to Thrive Apprentice in the coming months, so stay tuned.

6. Thrive Architect integration with AIOSEO

We've joined forces to work with the team at AIOSEO (All-In-One SEO) to bring a seamless SEO integration to Thrive Architect.

And it's awesome!

If you install AIOSEO (which is free— download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory), and you open Thrive Architect to edit a page, you'll notice a new SEO score at the top and the AIOSEO icon on the right hand side.

That number at the top is a live score of the SEO content on your page, and reads the text and headings that are visible in Thrive Architect. As you write more content, change which heading tags you use, or modify the placement of your target keyword, you'll see that score update immediately.

Higher scoring pages are those that are structured the way Google and other Search Engines like them, and will help you rank higher in search results pages.

But what about the AIOSEO icon? Click that, and a whole SEO panel will open up.

From here, you've got access to all of AIOSEO's features and functionality, relevant for your page.

Under the General tab, you can configure how your page title will appear to Search Engines, you can set your target keywords, and you can see SEO warnings, suggestions and alerts.

For some options in AIOSEO, such as setting the Social Media image and meta descriptions, a lightbox will overlay your page in Thrive Architect, making it easier to configure those settings without being confined to a small sidebar.

It's an amazing integration that puts you in charge of your SEO, which is essential if you're looking to grow your online business built with Thrive products.

To get started, make sure you're running the latest version of Thrive Architect, and download the free version of AIOSEO.

We’ve Got More on the Way

We've worked hard on these new features and we're excited for you to try them. 

Your feedback matters to us - it helps shape what we build next. We'd love to hear what you think about these updates and what else you need from Thrive Themes to help your business grow.

What new features would help you the most? Tell us what you need - your suggestion might become our next big feature!

General Manager, Thrive Themes