UPDATE: If you've come here looking for information about integrating PayPal into Community Server or about paid subscriptions for Community Server, I and several other Community Server technical evangelists have put together a product named Four Roads Commerce. You can find information about it at the Four Roads website.
You always have to begin somewhere. For this project, we're going to begin with the requirement where you accept payment for a subscription through PayPal.
Sounds easy enough, doesn't it? I'll use the PayPal's SDK for ASP.NET so we have an interface into PayPal.
But questions come to mind.
What if somebody wants to accept credit cards through a gateway other than PayPal? I won't support that in version 1.0, but is there anything I can do to pave the way for handling other payment gateways?
And how should the website authenticate with PayPal? Is it good enough to use the API Signature (i.e., username, password, and digital signature)? Or do we also need to support an API Certificate?
If we support API Signature, how do we encrypt and store the signature?
Finally, how do we make use of Community Server's multi-site support? Will you be in a situation where you are managing multiple sites and you need to use different PayPal accounts for each of them?
We'll start going through the technical answers to those questions in the next post.
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Sean Winstead
Tags: CommunityServer