Drupal 6.x and Paypal integration

May 3, 2008 10:05 AM

Alright, I am running Drupal 6.x and I need to be able to accept one time donations and recurring payments. The optimum solution would be a fully integrated paypal presence on my Drupal site. But how? I'm n00bish....

I have the API credentials for my paypal account, and that is as far as I have gotten. The moment I start reading about RUBY or PHP installation, my eyes start to glaze over, but I am capable of doing such an integration if I have clear direction.


My problem is that Paypal has way too much documentation, and I don't really have a good 'step by step' road map on how to integrate paypal into my drupal site.

posted by yoyoceramic to Technology (4 answers total)

There are a couple of solutions for this in Drupal 5, but I don't believe they've been ported to Drupal 6 yet. I'd suggest checking out http://drupal.org/project/simple_paypal -- it's maintained by a relatively active member of the community and it manages the actual PayPal integration. The 'donate' module that's used by the Drupal Association uses that module for its actual integration.

Sorry there isn't better news for Drupal 6 yet; it should be better in a month or two but for now checking about the D6 upgrade path for that module is almost certainly your best bet.
posted by verb at 11:08 AM on May 3, 2008

You might also check out LM Paypal, which isn't well-supported by the maintainer, but HAS been upgraded to support D6 by a member of the community. This issue thread has a copy of the ugpraded module.

LM Paypal has the advantage of supporting one-time donation and 'subscription' style payments out of the box. If I remember correctly, it assigns a role to users who pay via subscription, and removes that role when the subscription expires. I used the Drupal 4.7 version of it a couple years ago on a client site, but haven't touched it since.
posted by verb at 11:12 AM on May 3, 2008

If you're using the Website Payments Pro, then it's a simple (well, relatively simple) task of using the SOAP API to process whatever form you come up with. There's actually no install to speak of with the Paypal API, all the 'install' script does is copy it to a specificed location in your web root dir (all their code is stupidly 'enterprise-y' like that). Should be one-two days of developer time, tops, for someone who knows what they're doing. I've written some code for 5.x that works with the .. drupal e-commerce plugin callbacks (i think), but it was in the context of my employment, and so I don't think I'm allowed to release it (I'll have to check).

I wrote it in Feb, and I didn't find that there was any viable solutions for Website Payments Pro at that time. I'm pretty sure lm paypal is IPN only (meaning it transfers you to Paypal, then back to the site, instead of doing a seamless SOAP call in the background), which isn't what you want if you sprung for the Website Payments Pro (although you *can* use it). Looks like simple paypal is IPN too.
posted by fishfucker at 2:43 PM on May 3, 2008

but yeah, if you just have the 'free' paypal account, you want the lm_paypal or simple_paypal, and I'd just hold out until someone finishes the port (or offer a bounty).
posted by fishfucker at 2:44 PM on May 3, 2008