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The story of the frame layout, paypal & cat proof security.
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- Omnitech
- Newbie
- Posts: 6
- Thanks: 0
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Hello,
Please strap yourself in if you wish to hear my troubled tale of frustration and woe, wrestling the bull of the internet in a futile attempt to achieve it's submission. ;P
It all sounded so innocent.... over christmas dinner, with perhaps a drink or two too many, yours truly took it upon himself to boastfully claim to his father; "This fancy Joomla CMS thing... it can solve all the problems you're having with your website! Sure, I can make it for you, no problem!".... And so it began.
My father runs a small company that makes textbooks and learning material on many different topics,
These books are entirely webbased, simple html, frames, and flash. He's been doing this for years, and while he's competent enough with the tools he's used to, he is not particularly tech savvy.
For this reason he's been accepting payments online, and treating each customer manually the next day. He's sick and tired of it, and wants automation. My plan was simple; redesign his sales page, collect payments with paypal, and serve the contents of the books within the joomla sites "members" section.
I've bought and installed a joomla script that links up with the paypal Instant payment notifications, and creates joomla user accounts, so that buyers upon payment can log in as registered users, and gain access to subscription content. When their payment term has ended, the account is automatically deactivated, and they lose their access. So far so good.
Now however, things get dicey. If you look at the following link, you can see how the textbook in question is constructed.
www.internettforlaget.no/bok/bfpr/
It's in norwegian, but you get the gist. Click "Innholdsfortegnelse" in the top frame, then "Kapittel 5".
It's a 3 frame layout, with a static topframe, and equal left/right frames. Text is served in the left frame, while picture and animation links open in the right frame. Despite frames being a rather antiquated technology, this layout is actually very functional for the purpose. Clicking an image never disrupts your reading, and if he's talking about something in a previous chapter, he can link it in the left frame, and have it open in the right frame.
I've been trying to duplicate this functionality within joomla, but I find myself struggling. I've tried using a wrapper, but it doesn't look good. It eats away useful screenspace, it often creates an extra scrollbar for the joomla page, as well as for the iframe, and it's not "protected" as being within the member page framework. Anyone can easily see the actual url of the links used, and go directly to the iframes source. I even found a modified version of a shadowbox module that would "scale" the page to fit the available screen size. But it's still just an iframe. IE won't open links within the framework when served through a wrapper. That breaks the whole design.
Is it possible to recreate the left/right frames within joomla? complete with scrollbar and "open in the other frame" functionality for clicked links? The top frame could just be a joomla top menu, provided I can make it pinned to the top. Is this possible? I don't know much about javascript, but could I perhaps make a template with a 60% width column for the text on the left side, then a module position on the right, and have pictures and animations load there, like a sort of localized shadowbox.
Barring unexpected success with that idea, I've pretty much conceeded to the idea that I need to go outside joomla to deliver the actual textbook. A direct link like the one above works beautifully in all browsers. But as I intend to set this up as a subscription service, simply providing a static link, will in reality grant all users permanent access.
So then I need to password protect the directory with the textbook, yes?
The most elegant solution would be the mod_auth_mysql apache extension, and pw protect the directory with username/passwords from my joomla db. Unfortunately my webhost does not provide this extension, and even if they did, I'm unsure I'd be able to set it up. Does anyone know any (preferably european) hosts that offer the mod_mysql addon?
I've considered simply letting all users share the same login, and provide the correct username/password on the joomla member pages. This could work with a subscription model, as long as I cycled the passwords. That way, if your subscription to the joomla member page ran out, so did your ability to know the appropriate login information to the textbook.
But - this is a very clumsy solution, and it requires some manual work on a regular basis. while I'm sure it's possible to do some voodoo that would automate the password rotation, that is beyond my skills to set up.
Ideally I would just want a "magic link" in my joomla members section, that could authenticate to the pw protected directory, without serving as a backdoor my cat could figure out how to exploit. - Is that a total pipedream, or can anyone think of a way to do that using javascript or something? What about making the joomla member section landing page redirect to the book, and setting up some htaccess rule to only allow requests made serverside to grant access? (Ok, I admit, I don't really have a clue what I'm talking about here.
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Finally... if all else fails, I could throw in the towel, and NOT use joomla for the payment, and instead use some standalone script for dealing with paypal subscription payments.
This does seem like the most obvious choice, and I suspect this will be the recomendation. I'm just a bit reluctant to take that path, as I've put sooo much time into making this work seemlessly within joomla. Furthermore, I'm worried about the paypal button code, which was a MAJOR hassle to work properly on my joomla pages.I had to improvise a bit there, and use the hosted "email code" for my paypal buttons, rather than the standard form model.
While it seems to work with my current script, I don't know if it will in others.
Lastly, I've tried to find such a plugin, but nothing has stuck out as an obvious choice. Do anyone have positive experiences to share regarding any such product?
So there you have it! If you've stuck with me this far, I already owe you a beer
ANY and ALL feedback on this issue would be most welcome. As I am quite new to web technology in general, I might have missed a number of things, but I sure have spent enough time on this! I just want a solution that works, and after exploring so many different avenues, all with their peculiar little problems, I'm at my wits end. I hope someone here can help me see some new angles.
Many thanks!
Weyoun
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