How do I uncheck the recurring contribution check box by default?

Question

I've searched here and on the CiviCRM forum but haven't been able to find an answer to what I was hoping would be fairly simple.

I want to give people the option of making their contribution recurring, however I don't want the checkbox checked when the form loads I only want the checkbox checked if the user selects it. This is to avoid an embarrassing situation a month down the road when we process their donation again.

Here's a page with the form in test mode

I'm not all that good with code, but did look with Developer Tools and found this:

<!-- .tpl file invoked: CRM/Contribute/Form/Contribution/Main.tpl. Call via form.tpl if we have a form in the page. -->

I looked at Main.tpl (lines 147-177) but don't understand enough to remove the checked="checked" attribute from the input tag.

{if $form.is_recur}
<div class="crm-section {$form.is_recur.name}-section">
<div class="label">&nbsp;</div>
<div class="content">
  {$form.is_recur.html} {$form.is_recur.label} {ts}every{/ts}
{if $is_recur_interval}
    {$form.frequency_interval.html}
  {/if}
  {if $one_frequency_unit}
    {$frequency_unit}
    {else}
    {$form.frequency_unit.html}
  {/if}
  {if $is_recur_installments}
    <span id="recur_installments_num">
    {ts}for{/ts} {$form.installments.html} {$form.installments.label}
    </span>
  {/if}
  <div id="recurHelp" class="description">
    {ts}Your recurring contribution will be processed automatically.{/ts}
    {if $is_recur_installments}
      {ts}You can specify the number of installments, or you can leave the number of installments blank if you want to make an open-ended commitment. In either case, you can choose to cancel at any time.{/ts}
    {/if}
    {if $is_email_receipt}
      {ts}You will receive an email receipt for each recurring contribution.{/ts}
    {/if}
  </div>
</div>
<div class="clear"></div>

{/if}

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You're in the right place to see what's going on, but the wrong spot to do anything. The field will arrive in the template fully-rendered, within {$form.is_recur.html} or an equivalent Smarty variable. Editing the template won't help you there.

The form PHP code would allow you to change it, but that's not the best way to go about this: doctoring core CiviCRM code is a bad idea, and while there's a way to set up override files for code files, it's a clunky method. Besides, you'd have to navigate Quickform, which is a headache in itself.

The better approach to forcing a checkbox checked or not is to use jQuery. You'll have CSS-style selectors, so you won't need to troll through the templates to see where to alter the box. You can add your code in one of three places:

1. Somewhere in your WordPress theme
2. In an extension you write, using the Resource addScriptFile method to add a script within hook_civicrm_buildform (the preferred method)
3. Using an .extra.tpl file in your template override directory