PayPal Donations (Resurrected) for vB 3.0.7
 

This is a complete redux of my now two year old donations hack for 2.3.x. I have completely recoded this from scratch to work with both vB3.0.7 and Paypal's newest IPN (1.7 currently).

What it does:
Quite simply this hack provides you a way to receive donations from your website's users and provide them with the recognition deserving of a donating member of you community. It uses Paypal exclusively for the time being because of Paypal's "Instant Payment Notification" system.

The basics are this, your users go to your donations page where you have certain levels of donations available via hyperlinked "buttons". These buttons take your user to paypal's secure payment processing system where they pay you your donation. Once payment has been received, paypal sends your server a notification containing certain information pertaining to that specific transaction. Your server then repeats this information to the verification server (which is hardcoded into the system so that *spoofing* is rendered virtually impossible) which first checks to see if the information was sent by it, then checks the validity of the information. If everything checks out, it then sends your server a response of "VERIFIED". When this hack see that word after running the script it inserts all the information into your database so that you can see what was donated, who donated it, and where.

If the server returns a response of "INVALID" then this script drops the information into a separate table so that you can investigate the transaction further to detect fraud attempts. It also does this on any suspicious entries after a few checks. Once payment is verified and information has been inserted into the tables, the system then adds a few toys and items for the user to be recognized as a donating user. What you do with that recognition is up to you.

The side effects of this script are that you can also see when transcations are pending, refunded, reversed, etc, and the reasons why. I am still coding the back end to sort these functions, but the ability is there now.

Features:

• You as the admin have the ability to show as little or as much as you want about what happens with your donations.
• Your users will only see what you want them to see.
• You can show your donation goals to the public.
• Automatic updates EVERY time a user donates or retracts a donation.
• This can be run in "dummy" test mode using Paypal's Sandbox site for testing purposes before you go live with it.
• User selectable currency to pay in
  • System calculates the price in the user's currency based on today's exchange rate for that currency to yours
  • Daily CRON to update currency exchange rates

**Coming Soon**

• Your members who have donated are recognized for doing so in the memberlist and their postbit.
• Postbit Awards for certain levels of donations that you decide on
  • User has the ability to choose whether they receive the awards recognition

Stuff you have to do:
Files to upload: 5
Files to modify: 2
Templates to modify: 0 (for now)
Queries to run: (The install script does this for you, uninstallation is also provided as well)
Ease of install: easy, simply follow the instructions in the install script.
Time of install: ~5 minutes

***REMEMBER! Add your email address that Paypal has on file in Donations settings. This step is not an option, your payments, although they may be valid, will all be considered invalid if you do not do this! Sign up for Paypal's Premiere Account (Business), and setup IPN.

PayPal Registration:
You will need to register with Paypal for a premiere account if you have not already, if you have, but your account is probably a personal account, you will need to upgrade the account to a premiere account. Assuming that you have a premiere account and have been verified, you then go into your profile at http://www.paypal.com and the select Instant Payment Notification. There will be a checkbox that you must check, and an inputbox where you will need to place your script file. Simply place your entire URL to the paypal.php file there.

On most systems it will be either:

http://www.yourdomain.com/donate.php

or

http://www.yourdomain.com/forum/donate.php

That's all there is to setting up Paypal to work with your site!

If you are going to play in PayPal's sandbox (yes that functionality is in this script too) you need to have a developer access to their sandbox. More information can be found at paypal.com, I'm not going to go into large details, we're all big kids and can figure that part out ourselves ;).
************************************************
This is currently in Alpha Stages. This is for the few who are helping me on this give feedback until Beta, when Beta is reached I will post the zip here for full public testing (I don't see this taking more than a week or two, seriously).

Thank you for your understanding.

)O( Cloudrunner )O(

Excellent! I will install this and test it out, just something I was looking for!

-Jason

Very cool! Is there a demo online?

Not one that can be public due to licensing restrictions, but there will be screenies shortly.

Nice.. I cant wait to see them... :smoke:

Screenies of options both on and off

Image 1 -- All Options On
Image 2 -- No Currency Selector on Donation Buttons
Image 3 -- Donations Closed

Screenies of options both on and off

Image 1 -- Top Donators Turned Off
Image 2 -- Goals Turned Off
Image 3 -- No Options, Just the buttons and a thank you note.

And yes, we are phrased on the user-side of the house, AdminCP is not yet phrased...I'll get more pics of actual use up and admin side tomorrow.

The admin is still very CHEESY, but it's functional for now.

Hi Cloudrunner - looking really good :)

With the currency drop down, will your hack have the ability to set donations in Australian dollars (AUD)?

Thanks - Mike

Where are the files?

cu deta

It says in the first post.




looks great, can't wait for the release.

Absolutely fantastic! I look forward to seeing this as a finished hack! <3

This is hugely sought after, thanks for putting in the effort.

edit: I've finished coding the currency exchange part of the script and it is being tested as we speak ;)

I would like to see a live demo please. I can't take a good look at the screenshots.

Provide me with a hosted and licensed version of vBulletin so that it can be publicly viewable and I'll do that, until then, you'll have to wait until the beta release just like the rest of the crew. Sorry, licensing restrictions prevent me from giving out my testing server to the public.

I'm very anxious to see this!

But you are allowed to have a test board so... there ya go! :)

and I do, just not one I can give out...patience is a virtue

Patience is a virtue for those who like the status quo.

We're excited about this well needed hack, can you blame us?

Thanks again.

not really...lol

I'm stuck on the currency selector code at the moment, but hope to have the problem resolved tomorrow...

edit: I've finished the currency selector. It now runs a daily cron to update the exchange rates automatically to today's exchange rates, and then it converts the donation price to the user's selected currency automatically so that the user can pay in their currency and you will still get the amount you request in your currency.

Just to show that I'm not totally slacking off (this has become my one and only thing to work on over the last week or so...bear with me..), here's another screeny...

Been working on the AdminCP interface...

This is the front page of the donations admin...of course I am open to suggestions...

Excellent. What a good news for me today. Keep it up man. :)

yes this is fantastic, hurry up though lol!!

very nice hack :)

does this use CURL ?

and when its finished will it have the auto add a gif or something to the users postbit ?

how will it intergrate into the members that already have donated via subscriptions ??

see i have a specific usergroup that is called contributed and i use template conditionals to show a donated gif for members (post bit) maybe you could use the same instead of it being complicated just add a conditional to your install txt and make your script once VEREFIED is passed to the script the script will add a user secondery group to a contributed/donated usergroup (tounge twisted sorry).

but i like this alot i can keep track of my donations alot better than browseing paypal all the time and checking emails against users :)


Regards
Mickie D

I'm going as fast as I can on it ;)

Thank you, but it's still a work in progress, that's why I haven't yet released it.

No need for CURL, just a simple fgets(); and regexp explode to get the daily exchange quotes, and the system itself is using standard $_POST variables bounced between your server and PayPal's verification server to not only give notification, but to make sure that now spoofing is being done from the outside the servers (i.e. someone tries to inject variables to the program, but paypal's server will see this as erroneous data, and give a response of invalid...thus protecting you from possible hack attempts).

The current plan is to have the users be marked as a contributor, and based on that setting have the memberlist, postbit, and profile show that they have contributed, I haven't quite figured out how I want to implement this yet, but I am working on that side of the house as soon as I finish with the admin panel.

Unfortunately, integrating it with previously subscribed purchases will make it very difficult to setup to do that automatically since historical transactions are difficult to code for on an individual basis from PayPal. So I have added the ability to mark a member as a contributor without the need for a transaction, all you have to do is input their username, and total donations, the system will do the rest.

That would require an extra step on the part of the admin in creating a secondary usergroup to do this, and I'm trying to keep extraneous code modifications, and side-bar database INSERTS down to a minimum, so using the current system it only requires that a user be "marked".

The entire reason I'm bringing this back up folks ;)

)O( Cloudrunner )O(

hey Cloudrunner i cant wait for the release of this, hope it comes soon :D:D

Alright, as of now we are in Alpha Final. As long as no bugs raise their ugly heads we'll be going Beta by Friday.

Now this looks like the sort of modification I have been seeking, I hope all gos well with your testing Cloudrunner and look forward to making use it ;)

As a tester of this, I'd just like to say that CR is working very hard, and it looks like things are going very well.

Now if I only had people interested in donating to my site!!!!

:banana:

Dude...you are gonna make ALOT of people very happy.

WOW!!!

Does that mean they'll donate to my site?

Well...are YOU coding it? LOL.

Naw, just testing it.

<insert neener, neener nosies here>

Seriously, it's gonna be real nice. CR is doing a hell of a job.

Even when I email him a bug in the middle of the night!

LOL

This hack will be awesome when done. Thanks in advance.

I've some templates issues to address over the next week or so with the Alpha (seems that IE doesn't like em much, while mozilla, firefox, opera, and all the other non-ie browsers love the templates...oh well), but nce that's been addressed barring ay new bugs, we'll be going Beta with this, so here's the call for feature suggestions. Go ahead and post em here as I'll be asking a mod to move this *back* to the beta forum once we've gone that route.

Thanks for the support on this folks, I really didn't realize there was this much of a call for it or I would have done it months ago...

)O( Cloudrunner )O(

great job cant wait for this to come out.

Yeah, IE'll get ya every time. But it's still the most used by a long shot.

Good thing I use it, or you'd be working on those templates under a little more pressure, LOL!

thanks for the updates CR, any chance the hack will look like this?

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/

TheWebJunkie, this is what I am seeking also, would be great;)

Man I can't wait!! Thank you !!