Payment

The Payment feature enables the requesting and management of payments (invoicing), and connects payments to other features. Payments through this feature are not meant to be a complete shopping cart feature or to be used for complex international trade. The feature does not handle taxes, shipping or advanced reporting.

Payments can be entered manually (for cash or check payments) or through PayPal, CCLite for community currency payments, or using Credits.

Payments don't require a relationship to a site user. Each payment is standalone and can be paid by anyone, provided they can view it. Visibility is managed through permissions. Provided a direct link to a payment, anyone can view and pay the amount, which is useful, for example, to forward an invoice to a manager.

The payment mechanism enables actions to be registered when the payment is completed, allowing other components in Tiki to request payments and act on them.

Membership Management

Payments can be combined with PluginMemberPayment and group expiration to automatically subscribe members to a group or extend their membership upon payment.

Here are typical steps to have a monthly membership feature at a Tiki site:

1. Create a Premium Members group and set up the permissions so the content can only be visible to members of this group.
2. Set the expiration of the group to 30 days.
3. Set up your PayPal account information.
4. Create a subscription/payment page containing: {memberpayment group=Premium Members price=10}.

The payment plugin will require validation to prevent anyone from creating discount prices for the membership. The plugin will allow the visitor to pay $10 per 30 days per user for a selected list of users for a selected number of periods.

Upon payment confirmation by PayPal IPN or manual payment entry by a staff member (in the case of a physical check or cash payment), the memberships will be extended.

Cart

Initial support for a shopping cart has also been added. The cart feature is composed of a module to display the cart content and proceed to check-out and a wiki plugin to add items to the cart. The plugin must specify the information about the product purchased.

Once products are added and check-out is done, a payment request is recorded and the invoice is presented to the user. All handling of the cart's content by the site's owner is manual.

The cart does not calculate taxes or shipping costs. It only adds up the costs of all items.

Development

The Payment API is built to be initialized in code and to have behaviors to be triggered on confirmation. For custom usage or further deployment in Tiki (member management is one use case), see Payment.

Some tips about how it works: https://www.paypal.com/en_US/ebook/PP_OrderManagement_IntegrationGuide/ipn.html

Notes

• Use three-letter currency codes
• If the returnurl after the PayPal payment is not working, try to set a returnurl in your PayPal account (edit profile -> selling preferences -> website payment preference -> auto return on + enter a URL) This URL will be overwritten by the plugin, so don't worry about the value.

Files/URLs

tiki-admin.php?page=payment
tiki-payment.php

Related

• PluginPayment
• PluginMemberPayment
• Shopping Cart
• module payment_outstanding
• PluginDataChannel
• CCLite: http://sf.net/projects/cclite
• Community Currency
  Free software application made on PERL to support community currencies for Barter Networks and local communities.

Alias

• Payments