PayPal
Contents
MediaWiki Extension
MW:Extension:PayPal is an extension for creating PayPal donation forms using a <paypal> tag. PokerCoder requested adding IPN support to the extension through this RentACoder job and has accepted User:Nad's bid to complete the work.
IPN
Instant Payment Notification, included with Website Payment products, Express Checkout, and Standard Checkout, is available to PayPal Premier and Business members. Instant Payment Notification allows you to integrate your PayPal payments with your website's back-end operations, so that you get immediate notification and authentication of any PayPal payments and disputes you may receive.
When a customer makes a payment to you, PayPal will post a notification to your server at a URL you specify. Included in this notification will be all of your customer's payment information (e.g. customer name, amount) as well as a piece of encrypted code. When your server receives a notification, it will then post the information, including the encrypted code, back to a secure PayPal URL. PayPal will authenticate the transaction by checking the encrypted string. This post-back of the IPN data to PayPal prevents "spoofing," so you can be sure that the IPN came from PayPal. Upon verification, PayPal will send confirmation of its validity back to your server.
- IPN at PayPal Integration Center
- IPN Introduction for Developers
- DesignerTuts Tutorial
- IPN Manual
- IPN Technical Overview
- Instant Code Samples
- IPN Techniques
- Basic Inventory Management Using IPN
- IPN Test Environment
- IPN PHP Script Generator
- Good IPN tech info
PDT
PayPal Sandbox
The paypal sandbox allows all operations done within the paypal site to be performed within a test environment. To test paypal code working in other sites and applications, you must set up two accounts under different email addresses, one for the buyer (in https://www.sandbox.paypal.com) and one for the seller (in https://developer.paypal.com). The buyer must add a credit card from which the payments can come from when testing a purchase operation. To do this, login to the buyers account (at www.sandbox.paypal.com) and then go to profile/financial information/credit cards and make a note of the credit card number it shows and then proceed to "add credit card" and use the number to fill in the form.
