Paypal Donations for vBulletin 3.0.7
 

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 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.

• 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.
• Your members who have donated are recognized for doing so in their profile and their postbit.
  • Your shy users have the ability to hide their donation status from public view in their profile options
• vBadvanced CMPS Module Integrated
• You can set Goals and have donations count for or against a specific goal
• Multiple Currencies are supported automatically and use TODAY's exchange rate to make the donation (vB Cron Enabled)
• Everything is controllable in the AdminCP
• User-side is 100% phrased
• System completely ignores any transaction not placed by it (i.e. Ebay transactions and other PayPal transactions are not included in your transaction history (cuts down on DB bloat)).
• Donate Button(s) PNG source provided (Image Credits go to SLeeeper, Thank you for the help!)
• You do NOT need to have paypal's IPN pointing at the system. The system tells Paypal WHERE to send the IPN transactions :-}

• Postbit Awards for certain levels of donations that you decide on
• Donation / Donor Categories

Files to upload: 34
Files to modify: 3
Templates to modify: 1 (required) / 2 (Optional)
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

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, you do NOT have to point to the script at Paypal, if you choose not to do this, then you will need to make sure that your Notification URL is put in the settings or this script will NOT WORK!

On most systems it will be either:

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

or

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

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

Upload all the files in the archive into their provided directories

Run the provided install file, setup your settings, after installation, DELETE THE FILE!

This will usually be:

http://www.yourdomain.com/forum/admi...ns_install.php

or

http://www.yourdomain.com/admincp/donations_install.php

To begin with, you simply upload all the files into their respective directories (keeping the structure in the archive).

After you upload the files, point your browser to the installation file: donations_install.php and run the installer all the way through, remembering to save your settings at the end (you MUST put in your paypal email, and the path to donate.php, and the path to ppverify.php). Remember, if you have the system set in test mode, you will not be able to process LIVE transactions. If you are going live immediately, then change this setting to no!
After you install, simply delete the donation_install folder and all files within it, and the install file.

Now you are ready to play. The system is 100% phrased on the user viewable side, so you will need to edit some of the phrases to better suit your site, specifically the phrases titled:

your_donations_are_appreciated
all_donations_go_towards_furthering_goals
donation_used_to_further_mission

are the ones that I recommend redoing to suit your site.

After editing the phrases, next comes adding your donation buttons and goals.

Always add your goals first as the buttons can be attached to a specific goal so that the user gets credit for donating towards a specific goal (you can of course add a button that does not attach to a goal for a general coffer fund type of deal, but goals are the preferred method).

After adding a goal, you can then add a button to the site.

The settings for the buttons are self-explanatory for the most part, the only required input from you is the title, and the description of the button. Everything else will work fine without input.

The system defaults to use the USD currency. If you change this currency in the Donations settings, then to get the correct exchange pricing, you need to run the CRON file to update your Exchange Rates table.

To do this simply log into your AdminCP and then do the following:

1. Scroll down your navigation bar on the left and find the Scheduled tasks navigation group, open that up and click on "Scheduled Task Manager".
2. Find the CRON named "Donations Currency Exchange Quotes"
3. To the right of that you will find a button named "Run Now"
4. Click that button and wait until the system says Done.

Once the system has reloaded the exchange rates using your new currency you are ready to go and start collecting donations.

From there, it's all fairly intuitive. The biggest thing to remember is that to use this hack you MUST have a paypal Business or Premiere account, and have turned IPN on in your Paypal profile. If you run into troubles with a transaction, make sure that you are not trying to verify a sandbox transaction with the live Paypal server and vice versa (the test setting). Secondly, this system will notify you of suspect transactions that Paypal refuses to validate. If you get an email stating that a transaction was invalid, it would suit you to investigate it to find out where the transaction came from and why it failed verification. If all is kosher you can add the donor to the AdminCP so that they get credit for the donation.

To assist in this you can edit an invalid transaction to show as valid if the transaction turns out to be kosher. The steps to this are as follows:

1. Make sure transaction is valid
2. Edit invalid transaction to show as valid
3. Edit goal and add that transaction amount to the total
4. Edit / Add donor (user) to the DB to give credit

This will get the transaction into your database properly and give credit everywhere it is needed for the system to read it properly.






You will need to add a link somewhere in your navigation system for vBulletin pointing your users to the donations page (if you installed the vBadvanced Module then you have a link on the home page, but you might want to add one in the nav bar as well), as well as setting up your paypal account to give IPN responses to you, you can do this in your Paypal Profile under Instant Payment Notification.

To play in PayPal's Sandbox you will need to be registered with their developer network and setup a few sandbox accounts to play with the sandbox properly. I have throughly tested the sandbox functionality, and it is working until they decide to change coding standards again.



I sincerely hope that you enjoy this hack, Please feel free to send feedback to tnp@noblepagan.com!

To view this in action head over to: http://damn.that-sucks.net or http://www.noblepagan.com

Thank you!

)O( Cloudrunner )O(

P.s. Anyone who feels the need to donate to me (*hint hint*) feel free to do so, I won't stop you ;) (yeah, I'm as greedy as the next guy). In fact we are a non-profit organization over at The Noble Pagan, so your donation would be tax-deductible :D.

LICENSE:

I am releasing this authorization in the hopes that someone will be able to carry on the work that was begun.

Excellent!!!!

Had to be first man.

I changed a few templates for my own liking, but these are some good shots.

I also changed the colors on the bar.

Nice work...
Have you got any screenshots?

Good lord, why is it in almost every release there's someone who asks for screenies within the first ten posts?

As requested, Screenies attached...

Yeah, and while yer there, register and donate a dollar, I could use the users AND the cash!!!!!

Greedy :P

But honest!

So I hate to be the first one with a problem, but here it is.

During install, I get to the third step when I encounter this error.

What could the problem be???

ok....i have a problem...tried to install and am getting database errors

Database error in vBulletin 3.0.7:

Invalid SQL: INSERT INTO settinggroup VALUES ('donations', '2020', '1')
mysql error: Duplicate entry 'donations' for key 1

tried to uninstall and get the following errors:

Warning: main(./includes/adminfunctions_language.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/fragtrad/public_html/forums/admincp/donation_install/donation_uninstall.php on line 15

Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required './includes/adminfunctions_language.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/fragtrad/public_html/forums/admincp/donation_install/donation_uninstall.php on line 15

Not being the guru here, sounds like a version issue?

Is this your first install? If so do you have anything else that added a 'donations' value to your DB?

nothing that added a donation value to my site...

can ya tell me how to delete the value from my DB?

Did you run the install twice or hit refresh?

If you never installed it, as in you weren't a tester, I dunno how you could get that entry.

you have to be able to pass information back and forth from outside servers for this hack to run. If you run into this problem you will need to uninstall and get a server that will talk to other servers via HTTP properly.

Looking at that right now...gimme a minute.

when i first ran the install i ran the first option and it didnt work so i tried the second option and now i get that error....i went into my db and removed all donation tables i saw and when i run the install now i get:

Invalid SQL: UPDATE donation_currency_exchange SET `USD` = '1'
mysql error: Table 'fragtrad_fragtraders.donation_currency_exchange' doesn't exist

The duplicate value is there only if you have something else installed in that column with the same name. There is only one line in the system that calls that specific query.

On the uninstall error, where did you place your donations_install.php file?

ok i got it all uninstalled and a fresh install seems to be going fine...gimme a minute or so to do the file edits.

if you goof on an install with ANY hack that includes an installer you must first uninstall that hack then reinstall it using the correct option. period.

gimme me a minute to figure out your uninstall error before you try anything else please.

Too late.

I know all about the dangers of installing over an old install.

Yuck.

seems to be running fine .... great work

Aight folks, I've updated the zip file with what should be a better working installer. Made some adjustments to the require_once calls in the installer, all should be good now. Lemme know.

Again, if you have troubles installing on the CRON job installation noted previously that means that you cannot talk via HTTP from server to server, and therefore you lose alot of the functionality of this hack. Thus this hack is essentially unusable for you until you can get your server to talk to the other server that gives the exchange quotes daily. If you cannot do the CRON talk between servers, then the system will not work for you because that means that you will not be able to talk to the Paypal servers either. There's nothing that I can do about that in that case, that is between you and your server host.

Doesn't seem to like 3.0.6 :disappointed:

Points at the title of the hack...

Installed dozens of hacks supposed to be for 3.0.7 on 3.0.6 with NO problems

you can try to uninstall to remove that line from the system and then attempt another install...That error comes from a failed attempt at adding the phrasegroup_ppdonations when it was already there. This is caused either by a failed install or by a previous install...if an install goofs folks you NEED to uninstall before you attempt a reinstall or you WILL get table errors...

I've installed this too many times over the last few days.

If you get a dupe msg that means you had a hosed install prior.

I learned this lesson the hard way.

I'm gonna fix that problem right now, didn't think I'd run into the problem on a fresh install with folks LOL.

Anyway, I'll get the dupe message on installs fixed and update shortly.

Yer a push over. But I guess it'll save problems that could be avoided.

how can i add this as a sideblock......do i need vbadvanced to do it?

That'd be the best way, it has the module built in.

Otherwise your gonna have to do some mods by hand.

yes you need vBadvanced to get the sideblock.

Out of curiosity, how does the way this pulls data from another website differ from my sports or weather module pulling data from a site? I am trying to trouble shoot why I can't get this data to download into my database. I am wondering if that's the problem, or if my webhost is blocking needed ports.

The cronjob add is a two fold system, during install it tells you whether or not you will be able to use this hack because it pulls the data in the same way that PayPal talks to your server, through port 80 HTTP calls. If it fails, you cannot use the system because Paypal will not be able to talk to your server at all. The second function is during actual use, it updated the exchange rates for the system daily so that should you use the exchanges they are calculated properly for that day.

If the cronjob cannot talk via port 80 via standard HTTP calls, then paypal's verification servers will not be able to talk to your server either, effectively nullifying your ability to use this system.

I wish there was something that I could do to fix that, but alas, I cannot.

Man, I thought you could do anything.

Well, you could hobble something together yourself, but it'd be way more work, vBadvanced is about a 10 minute install then a whole new world of things to add on.

I'm just about out of things to add on. I have every hack on this site that was remotely useful installed, about 65 of them.

I'm gonna get bored now.

Hey folks, just a quick note to let you know that if you have been running into errors on install or uninstall, I've created the fix, and updated the zip file here on vb.org.

Just overwrite everything if you are having problems and then uninstall and then install again.

Yes, this should even work for 3.0.6 as well...but I don't know.

Anyway, this should fix all the problems we've had with the initial release of this.

For those problems I apologize, I really didn't plan for those issues because we didn't run into them across the four servers we played with this on.

Forgive me, anyway, please let me know if there are any more problems with this release!

Now see, if I was really a jerk, I'd ask what a "quick not" was.

<Dennis runs off laughing hysterically>

I promise, I'm completely sober, just in a really good mood.

picky brat LOL

Yeah, but in this situation, picky is what ya need.