This is getting ugly. So many extensions in play. I’m just going to make some notes here about the various extensions and their version numbers.
Joomla! 1.0.15 Stable – the CMS
JUGA 1.01 – the user groups extension
JoomlaPack 1.2.3 – Joomla backup extension
Community Builder 1.2.1 Stable – user profile extension
AEC 0.12.6RC2o <– lolz – subscriptions/paypal
FireBoard 1.0.4 Stable – Forums
Using Your Own CSS in Joomla »« Emailing via PHP 5 and Gmail
This is something I’ve been trying to setup for a while now. I’ve finally got it and here is how I did it. It is totally fucked!
I take it back! It’s not totally fucked. There are some pretty easy to follow instructions over here.
So far so good. My test email script is sending emails properly. Next I will see if Joomla makes use of this correctly. Because the technique works at the PHP level, I believe it’s going to be no-fuss.
It works!
Well I got a long list of things to do today. I’ve installed Fireboard on the server.
I should not even link that hideously ugly site, but if their extension helps me get my job done, I will have to thank them. Still, their website has far too much clutter to appeal to me.
The client has devised an extensive system of user groups and access control. I think it’s probably a little overblown for something that might not really get that much traffic.
The integration between users in Fireboard and users in Joomla is a little lacking from what I see. I’ve got to spend a little more time with it though. I think that Joomla’s built-in user management is inadequate as well. Maybe the AEC extension is going to be the way to setup these various user groups in the system.
Emailing via PHP 5 and Gmail »« If It’s Not Broken Do Not Fix It and Other Aphorisms
Working on the joomla stuff again and I have to tell you that when you setup your fields for Community Builder, you might as well just get all the settings right the first time. The user interface for updating properties of the fields is really bad.
It’s in bad need of some AJAX. Say you want to mark a field so that it appears in the registration form. You will need to go to the CB Field Management page and scroll down the list to find the field, then click on the red X to change it to a checkmark. Wait…wait…….wait for the page to reload. Hit your Page Down key to scoot back down the list and mark the next field. It’s kind of fun if you liked the old Track & Field arcade game. A lot of extra button pressing, you know?
So it’s best to just set these up right, from the start. Another aphorism: why can you never find the time to do it right the first time, but you can make time to go back and fix it? My uncle Charlie used to say that one. God rest his soul.
And one more recommendation. You really should setup at least one of your websites on sites.google.com and get yourself some free mail hosting. While testing out my work I’m having to fill out a lot of registration forms and for each I must provide a unique email address. Google makes it easy for you to create up to 50 unique email accounts for each domain you host on google sites. Even if it takes me 15 minutes to setup my 10 test accounts, it’s a helluva lot easier than setting up my own email server on my crappy residential internet connection. Plus it’s free.
This is getting tough. I’ve got a few pissant bugs left on the website, css kind of issues and some navigation page-flow issues. Then I have some scary problems. Emails. Paypal. Both of these are hard to test. You at least need to setup some testing accounts to even start working on either of these problems.
I’ve been looking around the web trying to get more info. There’s nothing spectacular that I’ve found yet. I didn’t search too hard though.
Right now I’m going to get working on the Paypal part of this problem. I will be satisfied when I see the following:
That is the testing criteria right there. Here’s the trick. I have a Paypal developer account. In this account I’ve created two test accounts: a business account and a personal account.
In the AEC Central panel, all I see right now to acknowledge the payment is the following snippet of error message in the event log: “Payment Notification Parser responds Invoice status: Unknown Error”. That’s something which might just go away when this goes live. The other thing that happens is if I click on View Invoices in the AEC Central there is a new list item for the transaction. I can click “clear and Apply Plan” and the user’s subscription is extended another year. This seems like a pretty satisfactory result for the last item on my list.
Looking around a little more I have found the paypal developer network community forums. This might be a pretty good place to go with my questions.
It doesn’t help that I’m so very clueless about the down-and-dirty details of paypal and ecommerce. There’s a term that I do not yet understand, and looking into it a little I’d say this is part of the answer. There’s something called an IPN or IPN Posts. This apparently transmits data regarding the transaction back to the server. I see there is (or was) an extension called mosIPN and this allowed the authors to fulfill orders when they were asleep.
I guess I don’t understand why anyone would have to go in and update the invoice in AEC Central. Shouldn’t the user be immediately able to login after making their Paypal payment? I don’t get it.
Oh, by the way, IPN stands for Instant Payment Notification…
Well I went into the AEC panel and changed the subscriptions, I turned off the testing setting. Now the flow does not work at all. I’m going to try using the email address of my actual client to see if that works. I don’t think it will because so far I haven’t really seen the difference between buyer and seller accounts in this testing scenario.
I was thinking, I should just turn everything on in the e-commerce side of this and try it out. You’d think that if I use my client’s email address and my own real Paypal account, I’d be able to put ten cents into my client’s account. But that did not work. I get an error message which says “The link you have used to enter the PayPal system is invalid. Please review the link and try again.”
From the Subscriptions list in AEC, I click on a subscription plan and can edit its details. In here there are two links of interest. One points to index.php?option=com_acctexp&task=subscribe&usage=1 and is labeled Subscribe, the other index.php?option=com_acctexp&task=addtocart&usage=1 and is labeled Add to Cart.
Wtf, the link i used to enter is invalid.
If It’s Not Broken Do Not Fix It and Other Aphorisms »« Just Start Over!
I made the fatal mistake of choosing the defaults for my apache installation on windows. Never ever use the defaults, do not put it into c:\program files. So much of what’s written for LAMP is written on linux and assumes that paths do not contain spaces.
I hit this point with my installation of the AEC extension. I got a hard to decipher error message and with no other recourse simply blew away my database and m7 apache installation afterwards. So I’m starting with a clean slate.
First I install Apache. Then I run the PHP installer again to ensure the new httpd.conf file has any php-relevant entries added to it. Next I install Joomla. This is the easy part. Then I install Community Builder. This is when it starts to get fucked up. This is a twelve step process. It’s about as fun as a typical AA meeting.
Then I run my couple of import scripts. But before I can run the second one I need to setup Community Builder for the new tab and the new user fields.
And there’s even more, but enough talking time to do the typing.
Paypal Integration »« Creating a Community Builder Login Module in Content
