UC Recurring Fees

rszrama - April 28, 2009 - 19:56

Ubercart has included the Recurring Fees module as a core module for some time now, allowing users to associate recurring fees with products that customers must pay for via credit card. Unfortunately, the module was never really there in terms of practical uses and extensibility. Due to its limitations and to its relatively minor importance to the Ubercart project as a whole, the development team decided to move it into contrib space where it could mature without limiting or being limited by the core Ubercart development cycle.

UC Recurring Fees 6.x-1.0 is a straight migration of the code from Ubercart as it stood at its latest point in the 2.x development cycle. It was removed between RC1 and RC2, as we forgot to nail down the issue prior to tagging the 6.x-2.0-rc1 release. Several community members have been developing code and ideas to greatly improve and maintain this module, and they will work on it through this contrib in the 6.x-2.x version and beyond.

New in UC Recurring Fees 2.x

Features:

New/improved API for payment gateways to interface with uc_recurring - see hook_recurring_info().
Ability to treat a recurring fee as a new order - so it gets access to everything a new order gets at the time of renewal e.g separate invoices, apply roles etc...
Option for unlimited renewals (ie: renew until canceled).
Option for recurring fee to be set that same as product price (this means that the recurring fee can be based on adjustments of a products from things like attributes).
Conditional action support - sending emails on failed renewals.
Extension API - administrators can configure what will happen on a failed payments, e.g order can be extended and re-attempts as many times as required.

Payment methods/gateway supported:

UC recurring now includes a module directory where all of ubercarts core payment modules are being included.

NONE - you can run uc_recurring without any payment methods/gateways enabled and it will track all payments owing.
test_gateway - allow you to test out an example credit card interface.
payment_pack - allow users to purchase recurring products via using off line methods.
Authorize.net CIM - full support for renewals, editing future payments, charging a renewal manually, updating credit card details and canceling recurring subscription.

Payment Gateway partial support (work has started on):

Paypal WPP and Paypal WPS.
Authorize.net ARB.

Thirdparty payment methods/gateway support:

If you are building support for recurring fees on another gateway you can refer to the uc_recurring.api.php file for documention as well as take the current implementations in the modules directory as a working examples.

Current known gateways the support recurring payments:

uc_securepayau (Australia)
uc_eway (Australia), see #459052: eWay recurring payment support

Finally uc_recurring no longer requires a payment gateway to work, if you have the uc_payment module disabled then you can test out placing recurring orders and see them appear on the site - these orders will have a "payment pending state".

Current plans for getting out a 2.0 Release:

Continual work on ubercarts core payment gateways integration.
Subscription UI - a simplified user interface for managing a set of subscription products.
Further testing - you need to be able to rely on this module for processing the correct payments on time which is why there are already simpletest coverage over a large portion of the modules critical features. We also need feedback from real live testing.

Upgrading from UC Recurring 1.x to 2.x

If you are using:

Authorize.net ARB - implementation of ARB in 2.x is still in progress, if you are currently using this gateway you should NOT upgrade to 2.x at this stage.
Other gateways - no other gateways were officially supported in 1.x so its recommend you test your upgrade process thoroughly before performing on a productions site.

Credits

2.x development by Chris (univate) of Univate, valuable advice and assistance also contributed by Amitaibu.
1.x development in Ubercart by Ryan (rszrama) of Commerce Guys.