PayPal Comments

[tshore]

I'm just starting to test the registration payment system in the PayPal sandbox and I have a few thoughts:

1. I'm wondering why the mailing address isn't broken up into separate fields (address, city, state, postal code, country). If it was, these fields could be used to autofill this information on the PayPal website (only applies for those who choose to pay without having a PayPal account). Plus, I think it's nice to have this info in separate fields for statistical purposes as well (ie. to look at the demographics of your registrants).

2. In my experience with PayPal (and no, it hasn't all been fun and games) many people will not follow through with their first PayPal payment attempt. I'm not 100% sure why this happens, but it does and fairly often. It would be nice if there was a way that a registrant could make another payment attempt. Right now, since they are not allowed to re-register, there is no way for them to pay. In the meantime, we could setup a link to:

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/websc ... ;nav=1.1.0

However, this still isn't optimal as only US residents will be able to send money this way without having a PayPal account. And it looks like most users will have to send their payment in US dollars and our conference will be billing in Euros.

[tshore]

Hi Alec:

Any possibility that either of these items will make it onto your OCS to do list?

Trudy

[asmecher]

Hi Trudy,

1. This is a tough one; having a single field for the entire address has worked well for us thus far in both OJS and OCS, and moving to multiple fields would impose a lot of headaches for existing users. It may be possible to attempt to parse the mailing address field in order to make "educated guesses" in the PayPal form that users could correct as necessary.

2. I've created a Bugzilla entry for this; see http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3166. It'll be addressed in OCS 2.1.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[tshore]

re: #1

I think that you could implement this without messing up existing users. You could allow for both options with a selection in the admin system Of course, you would need a big warning if they were switching and they already had entries in the users table.

[asmecher]

Hi Trudy,

Offering both options would be a good way to prevent disruption to existing users -- but in general this is not a high development priority for us (we're keeping our hands fairly full with features like the Scheduler). If it's critical for you, I'd suggest waiting for OCS 2.2 to be released, at which point the metadata storage will be overhauled in such a way that additional fields (e.g. address1, address2, city, etc.) can be added without modifying the database schema, and modifying the installation to support separate fields. After that point, it shouldn't be difficult to maintain a patched installation, even across upgrades.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[spatialguru]

... If it's critical for you, I'd suggest waiting for OCS 2.2 to be released, at which point the metadata storage will be overhauled in such a way that additional fields (e.g. address1, address2, city, etc.) can be added without modifying the database schema, and modifying the installation to support separate fields. After that point, it shouldn't be difficult to maintain a patched installation, even across upgrades.

Hi asmecher,
Do you have an ETA for 2.2? These sound like great features!

[jmacgreg]

Hi spatialguru,

We don't have an ETA as of yet, but we'll announce a Release Candidate and request for testing when we're getting close. Keep an eye on the Announcements page.

Thanks,
James

[shimrah]

If it's critical for you, I'd suggest waiting for OCS 2.2 to be released, at which point the metadata storage will be overhauled in such a way that additional fields (e.g. address1, address2, city, etc.) can be added without modifying the database schema, and modifying the installation to support separate fields. After that point, it shouldn't be difficult to maintain a patched installation, even across upgrades.

Hey Alec,

I'm wondering if any advances in the most recent version of OCS and OJS have been made along these lines? In OCS, for example, we have created Address1, Address2, City, etc. fields, but it would be ideal if this was an option. (Though, I'm not sure if the non-separate option would really be necessary.)

In general, being able to:

1. add extra fields of any kind (for other options, such as "satellite symposium" or "dinner"), as checkboxes, textboxes, etc; and
2. have complete control over which fields are required / non-required

would be very useful. We managed to create option1, option2... etc to fulfill these needs, but having it more controllable by GUI would be great.

Cheers,
ShImrah

[tshore]

I've applied this patch:

http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3166

but there is one problem with it. We need the user to be able to go back and change the category they registered for. That is, go back to the registration form. A couple of different scenarios need to covered here:

1. If somebody registers before the end of early registration (ie. discounted) and then doesn't pay, for whatever reason, and comes back after the end of the discounted period and wants to pay. They would need to be redirected back to select a registration category that was still active.

2. Say someone accidentally chose the wrong registration category, or simply changed their mind. They would also need to be able to go back to the registration form.

[jmacgreg]

Hi Trudy,

Thanks for the comments: I've posted them as a reply on the bug, which you can see from the same link. If you have any other comments on the payment functionality, please let us know, either here or as a bug report.

Cheers,
James

[tshore]

By far my biggest headache re: payment has been caused by the fact that the system is setup to only allow one payment method. I was surprised to see that the ability to offer multiple payment options was not included in the CVS that I recently downloaded.

In the past, some of my conferences have been content to only allow payment by PayPal. However, this year, one of my conferences is in Germany and, due to German banking law, PayPal will only allow people to pay with their credit cards if they have a PayPal account. There are many people that will not use PayPal to pay for something online, but there are many more that will not sign up for a PayPal account. These circumstances forced us to offer registrants the option of paying by international bank transfer. My other current conference will also allow payment by personal cheque. So, I have to somehow get the system to allow the registrant to choose their payment method. It's been a pain and it's still not ready to go. I'm hoping that both sites will be open for registration on Monday.

I edited the registration form template (templates/registration/userRegistrationForm.tpl) and I have one submit button for each payment option. I then edited function &getPaymentPlugin() in classes/payment/ocs/OCSPaymentManager.inc.php.

I've replaced this line:

Code: Select all

      $paymentMethodPluginName = $schedConf->getSetting('paymentMethodPluginName');

with this:

Code: Select all

      if (isset($_POST['registerBankTransfer']))  {
         $paymentMethodPluginName = "BankTransfer";
      }
      elseif (isset($_POST['registerPayPal']))  {
         $paymentMethodPluginName = "Paypal";
      }
      else  {
         $paymentMethodPluginName = $schedConf->getSetting('paymentMethodPluginName');
      }

I don't think it's particularly well done, but, so far, it works.

[jalperin]

tshore,

We are planning to add the ability to have multiple payment types. OJS already has the option to manually enter payments received by other methods and this will be migrated to OCS. Further, it will be possible (hopefully by the next release) to enable multiple payment gateways and have all the options appear at the registration point.

Thanks for pioneering the use of payments!

Juan Pablo Alperin
PKP Team

[jalperin]

A new patch is available to allow re-registration attempts. This patch must be applied after the previously posted patch is applied. Or simply wait until OCS 2.1 is released (very shortly) and upgrade.

find here: http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3166

As for multiple payment methods, this functionality will make it into the following release of OCS, but not into 2.1.

Thanks for the comments everyone.

[byteKultur]

Hi all,
I can still not see where I can use muliple payment methods. There is an option to integrate plugins, and they are listed to chose one for a conference, but the selection is made by radio buttons, so I can always have only one payment method for one conference...
Or did I oversee an option?

Best regards,
Terry

[asmecher]

Hi Terry,

No, it's still not possible to allow more than one payment method, though the feature has been requested a few times.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team