Need some tips on how to code something . . .
-
-
- Steve Fletcher
- Rocketeer
- Posts: 55
- Thanks: 0
-
Sorry if this is a bit off topic . . .
I run a site for a club that has a get together every year in the USA. About 200-250 people usually attend.
We take bookings on the website and accept Payments by Paypal.
Initially I had a Paypal button on the page, the payment was made and the user was taken to a page where they were asked to send an email with details of the people attending. The problem here is that some people did not send the email. So we had payments but did not know the details.
Last year I changed it so we had a form where we took all of the details. This info was emailed to the person dealing with the bookings. The user was then asked to click on the Paypal button to pay. So last year we had lots of details about people, but some decided not to pay straight away (or changed their minds) so we had no payment.
This is what I want to do -
Accept the details on a form.
Have a Paypal button that can only be used after the form is filled in.
Have Paypal (using IPN) return to a page where the form details are emailed.
That way we always get the info and always get a payment.
I think I understand how IPN works.
But I am not sure how to 'store' the form information while the user is away at the Paypal site. And the identify what data belongs to the successful payment.
We need to store lots of info. A booking may be for up to 12 people. It's too much to send as options to Paypal (unless I am wrong
)
The only thing I can think of is to write the form info to custom tables in the database abd assign a 'Reference Number' to them.. Then pass the reference number to Paypal. IPN would return the refernce number via IPN on successful payment and a script would select the rows from the database and email them.
Seems a bit complicated !
Can I get this to work with less effort ?
If you got this far - thanks for trying, hope you can help !
Cheers,
Steve
-
-
-
- GollumX
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 2817
- Thanks: 0
- there are a few bookings/reservations extensions at extensions.joomla.org. have you tried them?
- Say no to Internet Explorer 6.
twitter.com/mark_up
-
-
-
- Dan L
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 1453
- Thanks: 0
- I've done this recently using Attend Events and Paypal buttons...you can quite easily pass certain info from the booking form into paypal by editing the button specifics in the code - for example, I calculate the total cost payable by taking the "# delegates" variable and muliplying it by the per-person deposit amount. I also pass the email and name field used in the booking form as a reference (it gets appended to the "item name" in Paypal) so you can easily tie-up the payments made with the person who made the booking.
- Toolbox Digital | Dribbble | Forrst
-
-
-
- Steve Fletcher
- Rocketeer
- Posts: 55
- Thanks: 0
-
Thanks for the replies !
I tried all of the extensions that I could find.
None of them took info to be emailed after payment received.
The main feature of most 'reservation' components seemed to be the ability to check for vacancies and view 'booking calendars'.
I do pass some details to Paypal. But an individual can book for 12 people at a time - I'm not aware of any way of passing that amount of data (i.e. 12 names plus about 10 'flags' for each person) to Paypal.
Dan - when you tie up the email/name of the Paypal notification with the booking - is that a manual process or are you using IPN ?
I suppose my main problem is having those booking details available to the script that runs when the IPN message is received. Do I store them in the database or am I missing something obvious - like they are still available in variables for the script to pick up ?
BTW - I spotted your location. I lived for quite a few years just a couple of miles away in North Nibley and later in Wotton-Under-Edge. Who would have thought Wickwar would have had its own website ;D
Cheers,
Steve
-
Time to create page: 0.072 seconds