Creating a Campaign

Campaigns are created through a frontend form — the campaign wizard. Staff author campaigns from this form; day-to-day management of a campaign happens on its management view.

Accessing the form

The wizard opens from a couple of places:

• wp-admin → Ignition → Campaigns → Add New opens the campaign form. (The “Add New” link is wired to the frontend wizard rather than the standard WordPress editor.)
• After signing in, the login confirmation links to your dashboard. On a Platform Mode site, creators start a campaign from their dashboard’s Start a Campaign button; in a default install, staff create campaigns from wp-admin as above.

Creating a campaign requires the capability to create campaigns, which administrators and operators have. The form lives on the dashboard page configured in Ignition → Settings; if no dashboard page is set, WordPress shows a notice pointing you there.

Opening the site to outside creators

In a default install, campaigns are authored by staff. To let independent creators sign themselves up and run their own campaigns from the frontend — with an optional approval step before campaigns go live — add the Ignition Platform Mode add-on.

Wizard steps

The wizard is organized into steps. Each step shows a completion badge — a checkmark for complete steps and a number for incomplete ones.

Step	What it covers
Details	Title, description, goal, funding model, dates, video, image, categories, and tags.
Rewards	Reward tiers for the campaign. Only shown when reward levels are enabled in Settings.
Review	Summary of all fields with a list of any required items that still need attention.

You can navigate freely between steps — the wizard does not enforce a linear order.

Form fields

Field	Required	Description
Title	Yes	Campaign name (max 200 characters)
Description	To publish	Rich text editor (WYSIWYG). Required to publish, but optional for saving a draft.
Goal	To publish	Funding target amount (positive number). Every campaign must have a goal before it can be published, but a draft can be saved without one.
Funding Model	Yes	Flexible (keep all funds regardless of goal) or Fixed (all-or-nothing — funds returned if goal not met)
Start Date	No	When the campaign begins accepting contributions. Leave blank to start immediately upon publishing.
End Date	No	When the campaign stops accepting contributions. Must be after the start date if set.
Campaign Video	No	Paste a video URL from a supported provider (YouTube, Vimeo, and others supported by WordPress oEmbed). When set alongside a featured image, the campaign page header shows the image with a play button and loads the video only when a visitor clicks it; with no featured image, the video embeds directly.
Featured Image	To publish	Uploaded via the Insert Image button, which opens a streamlined image-only media picker. The picker has two tabs: Upload and Starter Images (a staff-curated library). Required to publish, but optional for saving a draft. Displayed on archive and single campaign pages. When a campaign video is set, the featured image serves as a fallback and as the social-share image.
Categories	No	Select from campaign categories (hierarchical checkboxes). Categories are managed by staff in wp-admin.
Tags	No	Pill-style input with autocomplete. When empty, up to five of the most-used public tags appear as placeholder text. Type two or more characters to see suggestions from existing tags; click a suggestion or press Enter/comma to add. Novel tags are created on save. A gentle reminder appears if more than ten tags are added.

Inline images

You can add inline images to the campaign description using the TinyMCE editor toolbar’s Insert Image button.

Adjusting the focal point

Once a featured image is set, an Adjust framing button appears under the image preview. Clicking it opens a modal showing the full, uncropped image; click or drag anywhere on the image to place the focal point on the subject (a face, a logo, the central object), or nudge it with the arrow keys. Loading the full image means subjects near the edges — which the cropped preview might hide — are always reachable. On save, all sized variants regenerate centered on that point — the single-campaign hero, archive card, dashboard thumb, and social unfurl image all use the focal point so the subject isn’t cropped out at narrower aspect ratios.

The focal point is stored on the attachment itself. If the same image is used by multiple campaigns (e.g., a starter image), changing the focal point affects every campaign using it.

Form actions

The buttons on the form depend on the campaign’s current status.

Button	When shown	What it does
Save Draft	A new or draft campaign	Saves the campaign without publishing.
Publish Campaign	A new or draft campaign	Publishes the campaign (status → Preview or Active, depending on the start date).
Save Changes	Editing a published campaign	Saves edits without changing the campaign’s status.

Saving never changes status

A campaign’s status only moves through the explicit Publish Campaign action (or the lifecycle actions on its management view). Saving from any step leaves the status exactly as it is.

Validation

The form validates input before publishing:

• Title is always required and cannot exceed 200 characters.
• Goal must be a positive number, and is required to publish (but not to save a draft).
• End Date, if set, must be after the Start Date.
• Description is required to publish (but not to save a draft).
• Featured Image is required to publish (but not to save a draft). You can satisfy this by uploading an image or picking from the starter library.

If validation fails, error messages appear at the top of the form and next to the relevant fields.

When you publish

Publishing sets the campaign’s status based on its start date:

• With no start date, or a start date in the past, the campaign goes straight to Active and begins accepting contributions.
• With a future start date, it enters Preview — visible, but not yet accepting contributions — and becomes Active automatically when the start date arrives.

See Campaign Lifecycle for the full status flow.