How to make your ProPhoto 7 WebSite GDPR friendly.

Did you know that ProPhoto 7 has built in features to help you get your site compatible with GDPR?

Over the last few months ProPhoto has released several new features to help Europeans stay up to date with GDPR using ProPhoto 7. We’ve curated a few ways to make your website completely GPDR friendly with your ProPhoto site.

Below, you’ll find some of the things ProPhoto has added in the recent months.

New checkbox elements to ProPhoto forms.
You can now totally disable social media network support by going to settings > site settings in ProPhoto 7.
Ability to delete entries from your contact form logs.
Comments now have an optional consent checkbox.

ProPhoto version 7.3.2 or higher is required to fully use all the features, so make sure you’ve updated to the latest version!

Creating a Policy

The first step to making your site GDPR friendly is to purchase or create a Privacy Policy. We’ve personally purchased, used and love the Easy GDPR course from the Contract Shop. You can take a look here or by clicking the image below.

The course will help you understand what GDPR is, how it can effect you, what you need to implement it in your business, and of course all the documents needed to get you started, including the Privacy Policy and Terms of Agreement. It also comes with support from the Contract Shop if you have questions or need specific help with adjusting your Privacy Policy to your needs.

This course has all 3 things in it that you need + training and support. That includes cookie consent, privacy policy, and terms of agreement.

Adding your policy to WordPress

Once you have your Privacy Policy, you can follow the steps below to create a new Privacy Policy page in ProPhoto 7.

Create a “Privacy Policy” page in WordPress and paste in your Privacy Policy.
In WordPress, you can go to Settings > Privacy and select the page you created as your privacy policy page and click save.
In the same WordPress area, click the “check out our guide” link to view the additions you’ll need to add to your Privacy Policy. Some plugins may also add things here that you’ll need to add to your policy if they collect any kind of data. As an example: the WooCommerce plugin has their own documentation you’ll need to add to your privacy policy where it fits, as well as Akismet’s spam plugin if you have either one of those installed since both use or collect user data when someone visits your website. The plugin additions will show up at the bottom of the guide.

Adding your policy to ProPhoto 7

In ProPhoto 7, you’ll go to Layouts > Add New Layout and name it Privacy Policy.
Assign your new layout to the Privacy Policy WordPress page you created earlier.*

*If you purchased a design from us, some of them already include a Privacy Policy layout ready for you. The only thing you have to do is assign the layout to your page and voila! You’re done!

Now that you’ve assigned your layout to the page, visit the page in your browser and click customize. Typically it would be something like: www.yoursitename.com/privacy-policy

You can of course always go to WordPress > Pages in WordPress to view any page, without typing it into your browser, or if you’re already in the customizer, just click the pages dropdown at the top and select it from the list to view and customize it.

Typically your design will have a few ready made blocks for you to add. Simply drag and drop them to your layout to get started. In our designs, we always include basic building blocks like “Menu/Logo” blocks, header blocks, and footer blocks.

If you’re starting from scratch with an all blank design, you’ll need to create those first before adding them, and if you purchased a premium designs most of them will come with those blocks completed already.

Since your privacy policy content is added via the WordPress page and not ProPhoto, you’ll need to add a ProPhoto 7 WordPress module to the design for it to show up on the layout. To do that, simply go to elements in P7, and drag and drop the WordPress module into the design. If you already previously created a WordPress block in P7 then you can also use that instead.

Here is what our basic Privacy Policy page looks like in our Wander design. We’ve created the layout, assigned it, added the logo, menu and footer blocks, as well as the WordPress content block so the wordpress page content shows up in the layout.

Adding a consent option to your contact form

The consent portion of GDPR basically says that if someone submits a form with any type of personal information in it or you collect any type of information through your website that might contain personable, identifiable data, then that user must consent to your privacy policy and or terms of agreement in the E.U.

The last step is adding a consent checkbox to your ProPhoto contact form.

If you haven’t already, create a contact form layout and add your contact form module to the layout. If you purchased a design, it will come with a contact layout already.
Click the settings icon for the contact form module.
Now click “Add form element”.

Once it adds it, you’ll want to change the type to “checkbox”

In the options field, you’ll want to change it to “Yes” and “No” as your two options you want users to choose from. Alternatively, you could also use “I agree” and only have one option instead.
You’ll also want to check the “required field?” box to make it a required option.

Next, you’ll want to add your link to your page in the label field. To do that, you can easily just copy and paste the code we have below, changing the url out for your own link and then just paste it into the label field.

Do you agree to our <a href=”https://yoursitename.com/privacy-policy”>Privacy Policy?</a>

You can see our exact settings below.

After saving, you’ll have something that looks similar to this.

Cookie Consent

To turn on ProPhoto 7’s cookie consent for WordPress comments, navigate to ProPhoto > Settings > Comments.

There, you’ll have an option to choose to show an opt in to cookie storage which you can enable. *This option only shows for non logged in users to your website.

Cookie Notice

A cookie notice allows you to show a bar on your website that tells you that the site uses cookies. While ProPhoto 7 doesn’t have any built in option for a cookie notice, you can always download a plugin and use that instead. There are many different ones out there to choose from, but our own site uses this one from Catapult Themes.

Adding a privacy policy URL in your copyright footer

There are probably 50 ways to add the privacy policy url to your design, but we wanted to point out one way by adding it to your copyright footer bar.

First, in ProPhoto 7, go to Settings > Copyright Area > Copyright

There, you can add your own copyright footer text. I’ve made it simple so you can just copy and paste the one below.

This is just the beginning of new and exciting features being added to 7 to better help you run your business smoothly and efficiently. If you’d like for ProPhoto to add more features in the future, feel free to get in touch with them for suggestions.