Revisiting the PayPal Beta Module
Posted by admin | Filed under Site News
Well I discovered that I had two motivations for revisiting PayPal payments in Prestashop this week. One is a new site that I’m working on for a client (more news on that later) and the other is that I discovered I had some free time in between the festivities. Well, not really free time but I managed to squeeze in a few hours at the keyboard anyway.
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Tags: cURL, fsockopen, payment, paypal
Paypal WPP (Example) – PayPal Direct API
Posted by admin | Filed under Development Resources, Free Prestashop Modules, Prestashop
Development Release
I’ve been asked several times about this, so I guess I’d better release the code. This was written some time ago, and the target PrestaShop version was 1.1, however it should work with later releases.
The archive contains additional code to support PayPal Express Checkout, as this was originally developed as a shared library. A PayPal Express Checkout example will also be published here shortly.
Please note that this is intended for “development” purposes only as an example and was written to test out various concepts in PrestaShop, not as a robust payment method for use in commercial stores.
Tags: development, example, module, payment, paypal
BETA Version 2 Paypal Module for PrestaShop
Posted by admin | Filed under Free Prestashop Modules, Prestashop
We’re pleased to release BETA 1 of our modified version of the PrestaShop Paypal Payment module that will hopefully address a few more of the shortcomings of the original 1.0.0.8 version.
This latest version provides tighter integration with IPN notifications, and supports all the current message combinations for both instant and eCheck payments. Refunds and cancellations are also supported, although only as far as this functionality is supported by PrestaShop itself.
Tags: IPN, module, paypal, Prestashop
eCartService Paypal Changes rolled into PrestaShop 1.1 Release
Posted by admin | Filed under Prestashop
We’re pleased to announce that the initial changes we proposed for the Paypal Payment module for PrestaShop have been incorporated into the official 1.1 release which is due in autumn 2008.
We appreciate the PrestaShop’s team recognition of our efforts and look forward to working with them even more in the future. We are committed to making PrestaShop an even better eCommerce platform for forward-thinking companies, and wish their up-coming release every success.
Tags: module, payment, paypal, Prestashop
Improving PayPal Support in PrestaShop
Posted by admin | Filed under Prestashop
When I first came across PrestaShop I was utterly astonished at how it looked and operated. Having spent years working with the likes of osCommerce, ZenCart et al. PrestaShop was a breath of fresh air, which reminded me greatly of another Open Source favourite of mine – Vanilla.
Having now spent some time working with PrestaShop and it’s underlying code, some of the shine has dulled a little, but there’s nothing that I can find that can’t be buffed back up to the stunning product that it surely will be.
The first challenge was getting simple custom design elements on the page like ssl cert images with java/html links etc. without requiring users to modify the template. PrestaShop’s intuitive module system is great for this, but these are trivial bits of code that don’t really justify the overhead of full modules of their own. AddStuff was born. Well that was easy!
Next it was the Paypal Payment Module which seemed to have issues. Initially the main problems were orders being “lost” due to lack of fsockopen support on their hosting platforms (the only connection method supported in the default module), but others were reporting issues with being unable to run multiple shop installations from a single PayPal account. The latter issue impacted my customers and to be honest would be a major deficiency.
A few weeks ago I posted a stop-gap solution which corrected a bug in the PayPal payment module which enabled multiple shop support, and yet another a little later to improve connectivity for IPN validation by adding support for fsockopen over https (the standard version surprisingly used only an insecure http connection) plus support for cURL as an alternative should the fsockopen method fail.
Over the past week work has progressed on a major overhaul of the module, to hopefully start addressing some of the more underlying problems with poor integration, and failure to capture carts abandoned at the payment stage.
The new version is nearing completion, and I’m currently looking for some volunteers to provide language translations, assuming I’ve got the internationalisation correct, plus some brave souls willing to BETA test on their sites. Anyone interested can post on here, or contact me at the PrestaShop forum: user Paul C.
Tags: addstuff, BETA, module, payment, paypal, Prestashop
Paypal IPN Validation update
Posted by admin | Filed under Free Prestashop Modules, Prestashop
We had an issue recently where there was some difficulty contacting the paypal server to verify an IPN passed back to a PrestaShop store.
The v1 Final version of the paypal validation.php file only uses fsockopen to establish an http connection to paypal (production or sandbox) to verify, so we’ve added a little code to ours to:
1) Use a secure connection if possible (using fsockopen)
2) Use cURL if the above fails to connect, and
3) Use an insecure http connection if the above fails.
The patched files can be downloaded here: Paypal module update for Version 1.0 Final
Tags: cURL, fsockopen, IPN, module, payment, paypal, Prestashop
Possible bug in PrestaShop Paypal Module
Posted by admin | Filed under Prestashop
While working on a Paypal test with a customer we noticed that the module appears to have an error which requires users to enter the IPN return url in their paypal account settings. This obviously means that it isn’t possible to set up multiple stores using PrestaShop if you have a single paypal account.
The offending line (42) in paypal.tpl contains the form variable return_url. The post variable return_url doesn’t exist in the Paypal documentation, but the value being passed is correct for the IPN url. This line should likely be notify_url instead.
We’ll continue our testing to confirm that this solves the problem with IPN configuration for multiple stores using PrestaShop.
Update: Patched paypal.tpl file to address the above issue: Paypal.tpl updated
Tags: module, multiple, payment, paypal, Prestashop
eCartService.net has been set up specifically to cater for the needs of small to medium enterprises trading online using the Prestashop eCommerce solution. It was set up in 2008 by Paul Campbell, a veteran in the IT industry who has experience of working in technology planning and implementation in some of the most diverse and technically challenging environments on the planet. 
