Tutorial? How does this module work??

I have to say I'm kind of stuck in a similar situation. Although not selling a product but rather an upgraded account, there seems to be only 2 ways to implement this module.. either with the function lm_paypal_subscribe() or the un-customizable block. I DON'T want to customize the function or block because I hate hacking modules / core, I'd much rather implement my own stuff in template.php or something along those lines. Any documentation other than the help page?

lm_paypal is not a generic payment processing module. It was originally intended for a couple of specific use-cases: donations, simple paid-advertisements, and paid role membership. If you want a more complete commerce system, suggest you look at ubercart or ecommerce.

Is there no simple beginners tutorial as to where to put the code to implement a donate button?

See http://drupal.org/node/389328#comment-1355484

In my view the problem is the confusion between subscriptions and payments in all of the documentation. I am at a complete loss to understand why the two completely different actions are connected in the way they are.

I can create a node type that requires to be paid for before it is published. However this is a classified advert it is not a subscription in any way, the word subscription should not be used, no one when making a payment for an advert is subscribing to anything - they are paying to place an advert. Not only is it confusing it is actually counter productive the word subscription infers a regular or at least some sort of ongoing commitment that would put people off paying.

The button saying subscribe presented to the about to be publisher of a classified ad is at best confusion and at worst would make them abandon the idea.

For classified ads all we want is for the advert not to appear until payment has been made. Subscribers, subscriptions etc are of no relevance. The button needs to say "Pay to publish this advert" or something similar.

Of course it may be that I have completely misunderstood the documentation. It is really frustrating in that if the Module did what it most users thought it did it would be a very very useful.

If someone can point out where I have gone wrong I would be most grateful. If anyone knows of a midule that will work as described make a payment to Payapl before piublication can they advise.

Thanks

Gordon

You're probably right, but unless someone steps up and writes the documentation (or provides code patches), nothing is going to change. OSS is a community effort, and right now neither of the maintainers of this module have any time to devote to it. Anybody out there is free to provide input: code, documentation, tutorials, whatever.

As it happens, the module suffers a lot of legacy issues, from the way it evolved (way before the current maintainers), so the code+documentation is full of language quite specific to the use-case of the original developer. The maintainers started a new branch, with significantly cleaned up code (more reuse+integration options, in particular), but that hasn't been worked on in a year or so. The fundamental technology works pretty well, it's just a bit undocumented, and unmaintained.

I appreciate the effort and the hard work that has gone into creating this module but it simply does not work properly if at all.

I have managed to hack the modules to at least make the English correct in that users pay for an advert not subscribe to a service to publish their advert. I know find that the advert is still not marked as paid, the currency for Sterling does not work and is garbled. The description of the advert being purchases that is shown in the PayPal payments screen is code "base 64 start ???????base 64 end" or something similar.

I have spent like others many hours trying to get it do the one simple task that it is promoted as being able to do. It may be me but it simply dos not work.

If it worked I am sure there are many who would be happy to contribute to the documentation I could certainly make it clearer from UK english commerce point of view. However you can not write documentation for something you can not get to work. All I wanted was ( I appreciate all might be a big thing in this case) was a module that allowed users to create a node then have to pay for it before being seen on the site. Does anyone have something that does this and works with PayPal. It is clearly much more trickier tha first appears as there are hundreds of threads on the Ubercart forum with users all seeking the same solution.

Forgive me if I seemed bad tempered and unappreciative of the efforts made by the authors. I am not going to spend any more time on this and will try and find a solution elsewhere. Any help much appreciated.

You describe several bugs, yet have not reported (or fixed) those issues. You haven't actually described what isn't working for you, or what steps you have taken to diagnose this. As you can see from the screenshots at http://paypaldemo.taniwhasolutions.com/screenshots/ the module does indeed work.

In particular, is your server accessible to paypal servers, does it receive the two IPNs from paypal regarding your transaction, etc). NOTE: lm_paypal (or any other paypal-IPN based system) will NOT work on a local dev server!!! Paypal needs to send requests to your Drupal site, and this won't work unless paypal can use the same URL as you do.

It is on a Drupal server. I can hardly fix the documentation. I have already offered to correct the confusing English in that subscriptions are not something a user would connect with purchasing an advert.

It may work for subscriptions I have not attempted to set that up. The currency scrambling for sterling is not unique I see it has occurred before. It does not update the node to paid and published after payment has been received. I am not sure how else I can describe the problem.

You say it works and you may be correct but I can not make it work. The documentation is not helpful.

I am sorry I appreciate the effort that has gone in but having spent several hours attempting to get the classified advertisng working as described I have given up and moved on.

If someone has the classified advertising module working as described that updates the node correctly, can use Sterling, and passes the product node purchase value to PapPal in plain english and can write a step by step instruction I will have another go.

Apologies I did not mean to offend anyone

There are some help pages, which were sufficient for me to get connected to PayPal and set up a donation site.

However, there were a lot of manual step involved that should have been more automated, such as creating and configuring the donation block, and no mention of the IPN return path.

My plan with the 1.x branch is to close out any remaining bugs in it and put out a final release, move all feature requests to the 2.x branch, and then focus on 2.x.