ABLE Mentor is a mentorship program that connects high school students with professionals. After passing the ABLE Activator program I joined ABLE (Association of the Bulgarian Leaders and Entrepreneurs). Members in the organization take giving back and volunteering very seriously. And I decided to join ABLE Mentor as mentor. I got matched with a student and we worked on productivity hacks and trick. And the student managed to do a video about her process. It was a wonderful thing. During the course of the program I got to know the project leader of the program and I understood that everything is run by volunteers. So I've decided to help them out by building a donation platform.

The ABLE Mentor website is build on top of Wordpress. It's a platform that I didn't want to mess with a lot. I wanted to build a separate service that I can manage independently. But it needed to feel like everything happens on the Wordpress site.

So I decide to have the donation forms on the Wordpress site, redirect to the donations platform save the data, redirect to the payment provider (the user enters the card details here), and then you're back on the Wordpress site receiving a thank you or error message. That configuration worked. The biggest challenge was securing the connection between the Wordpress site and the donation platform. I've implemented blacklists, timeouts and other measures to ensure that. All and all things worked out great. I've added a dashboard for the Project managers of ABLE Mentor to monitor monthly donations and activity.

The platform is written again in my old favorite combo PHP, Slim framework and Bootstrap. As an additional security layer I've encrypted all payment keys of the users. So even if a person had access to the database, they wouldn't be able to use the payment keys.

The platform is up and running and is still helping the project.