[admin (no pm's please)]

The long awaited cash mod work will get underway shortly.

This will not be some cash mod hack, but our own portal based system based around XPROFILE fields.

It will use at least three portals, making it a very flexible system, there will be some defaults to get people going.

The first portal will be a place where actions can be defined.

You you be able to select from :

Action: post|reply|newtopic|vote

Target: Self|Topic Start

Field: XPROFILE field

Command: Add|Subtract|Transfer To|Transfer From

Amount:

Flags: NOOVERDRAFT |

The next portal will define where the actions apply

Forums: All But|Only
Forum Id: space seperated list of IDs
Member Level: All | mods | admin

Last but not least a shop portal will define items people can "buy".

[admin (no pm's please)]

Coding is not off the ground for this at last Still no estimated release date, but at leats it is more totally in the chute.

[admin (no pm's please)]

[admin (no pm's please)]

I have started defining the "shop", the shop will allow buying/selling/giving of items.

There will be the ability to have multiple shops, each shop has a few parameters such as the currency that is dealt in.

What might seem confusing at first is that in the shop each item is only defined with a code.

The appearance of each item is controlled by creating a good old XPROFILE field for the item.

This is all part of the useful unity of the myff portal system.

The way things work are very general and hence the only limit is imagination and a bit of work!

[Manz]

Just out of interest, what does this cash mod do? i have not heard of this before..?

[admin (no pm's please)]

It was a mystery to me to

But one thing is now becoming clearer. This will not is already getting changed in scope, if we can have a pretend virtual shop, it may as well go the whole way and be a real shop

[admin (no pm's please)]

A bare bones shop component and template has been created, hardly started really but does lay the basis for the way templating will work.

Like the quiz system, there will be enormous flexibility offered  via the advanced template system. The shop component will pass all the information down to the template as macros, and a single template will deal with thumbnail display, item display, baskets and check out.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Got things to the stage where the shop will show items. Not had much time for making progress on this today though

[admin (no pm's please)]

This is more like it

http://www.nopdesign.com/freecart/

offers a free javascript cart solution. This will I think easily integrate with the template system and already provides payment gateways

There is no point reinventing the wheel  

[admin (no pm's please)]

This I like, with just a bit of twiddling a close to working shopping cart is there.

[admin (no pm's please)]

A good part of "paying" for stuff is now done.

So we have left to do:

1) Giving people what they "paid" for.
2) Tweaking the cart to remove info that should not be there in a virtual cart.
3) The all important processing of the first post in this thread, the ways in which people can get "CASH".

[admin (no pm's please)]

Well people now get what they pay for and do actually get their funds debited

It may be logical to move to the other bits now.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Have reconsidered a bit, there was originally the "buy back" option in the spec, which I sort of dropped when deciding to integrate with an off the shelf shopping cart.

But it has occurred to me, that to do this really just involves running the shop in a mode where only buy back items are listed and there the checkout process simply works in reverse. e.g. so long as the myff level stuff knows which mode things are in, then buy back is perfectly viable.

Coding this area does highlight other issues about integration. e.g. the shopping cart needs to pass back its basket bits, and we need to know bits about which shop is involved and deal with the shop being embedded as a portal in a web page.

I have to say though, we are despite the difficulties of the week ahead of schedule

[admin (no pm's please)]

Selling back seems to work reasonably well.

Now contemplating whether to get on with the bits that will make the shop operate virtually. e.g. how people earn their virtual currency, or whether to implement a paypal gateway and make the myff shop work in the forum.

It maybe that the order does not matter too much, as it all needs doing.

[connorconway]

O.o I never even knew you started on this yet :O

It's looking like it will be great so far

Great job Admin!

And thank you for starting this.. i've been awaiting this ever sinse i joined MYFF, hehe...

[admin (no pm's please)]

I have always said on this one that it was not going to happen until a vision for it was good enough, this took a long time to happen as I am far from convinced that people wanting it by and large knew what they wanted.

If you do things that are wrong they are very difficult to get rid of!

I am finally confident that what is being done is the right answer

[admin (no pm's please)]

4 payment gateways plus of course virtual payments now coded

I really hope we will get a few shops on board and get something good going.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Google checkout now there as a payment processor.
Nicks buttons now added.
The shop template now deals with people not being logged in if it is a virtual shop.

[archers-rest]

[admin (no pm's please)]

Well I have not put in 5 payment gateways for people to buy virtual baubles

[admin (no pm's please)]

I think it makes sense now to press on with the ways people can accumulate cash.

At which point we may be set for a release, there will still I think be things people will want, but it will all be clearer when people have stuff to play with.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Minor pause for reflection   I am using two portals to define actions and where they take place. I think this falls into what I consider to be the phpbb3 trap, add double the complexity to deal "elegantly" with things that 5% of people will want to do.

I think I need to drop back to one portal which might mean that people wanting to do very awkward things will have to define more rules than they would with the two portal approach, but meanwhile 95% of people find it easier to use.

[archers-rest]

[Symon]

[admin (no pm's please)]

I also think that this will be a very good mod that will integrate well with what we have now.

I bet some people thought I was just fobbing people off with excuses when I said it would not get done until it could be done right and it would have been relatively easy to go down the road of adding someone else's cash hack.

It certainly would have been easier than what will probably be about 40 hours or more of me programming, on top of the countless hours spent contemplating this feature!

But anything we do, we have to live with for a very long time  

[admin (no pm's please)]

touch wood the action matching is now complete, when a post takes place all the actions defined are checked to see which ones should actually be applied.

Next stop is applying them.

I'd say we are shaping up for a release next Monday, the delay until then being more because of other stuff going on than anything else.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I am adding the ability to show XPROFILE fields using a php sprintf format string:

http://uk3.php.net/sprintf

Will be useful for showing currency and generally making automatic display of the fields neater and easier.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I have just made a post and seen the topic starter get awarded virtual cash

Basically this means the core functionality is there, but there are an awful lot of permutations that can occur  

As such testing and rollout will be a little involved, and as stated will probably have to be Monday.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Another small touch of finishing is that you can now drill down to an item in the shop, probably not needed for the common type of shop. This is made more useful with a LONG_DESCRIPTION field.

The shop template now has the following modes.


{SHOP_S_MODE}
0 - individual item view
1 - row/column view
2 - View Basket
3 - Checkout
4 - Thank you for the order
5 - Payment not completed

At no point currently does the shop email anyone, typically both the shop and the payment processor will email both buyer and seller and so extra emails are a little redundant. But they may be useful.

I envisage attempting to set up a myfreeforum shop when this goes live and see what conclusions that leads me to.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Just got most of the way through the paypal checkout process. e.g. Items passed to the paypal cart and paypal wanting me to pay

[admin (no pm's please)]

Just one little muse, few things work first time, and in this case with paypal I had a problem as the template contains forms values for paypal and I had a field wrong. Sort of thing which if it happened in someone shop they could easily fix themselves as they would be editing their own template.

How good I wonder will people be at notifying us of fixes? or of new gateways they may be able to code in?

[admin (no pm's please)]

I am adding a few more things to improve the way sales tax is handled.

This along with shipping has to be the most complex lot of awkwardness going

There are several  things interacting, the server level shop code that only myff can alter, the javascript shop that the customer should avoid altering if possible, the shop template that they should customise, and last but not least the various payment gateways.

As people may know we like to run a very simple system where apart from advert free there are no charges for anything on myff.

I do find myself wondering that with a shop if people want to run a serious commercial shop, then whether making it possible for them to pay a fee and have their own version of the shop would be a sensible proposition. That way they would be operating safe from the changes that are probably inevitable as the shop system evolves.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I think I may rethink this and simplify.

Currently the code is set to recognize the fact that some goods are taxable and some are not.

But whilst this is true there is the 95% rule I commented on earlier, generally what people are selling does not vary in tax rate.

Given that you can have multiple shops on the system, that could deal with differences, it seems just asking for trouble to try and cope with the 5%.

If we simply say you define a shop with taxation and shipping defined at the shop level, then a lot of complexity at both the coding level and in terms of peoples ability to understand and use the system will be removed.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Added an internal payment method that takes email/shipping info and will email admin/customer.

I think I will also add an emailer at the point where the payment processor returns to the site.

I will make this email in effect a dump of all the forms data it is passing to the admin, with a view to refining this for each payment method at a later date.

You can never have too much info on a shop order IMHO.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Well that bit is in theory done.

There is in effect a switch statement for each payment type that will either process intelligently the form data and email the admin and the customer (must add some customisable bits for this actually) or it will dump the forms data and just email the admin.

The customer should always be notified by the payment processor regardless.

Just need to psyche myself up to spend some money. I know I can always refund myself, but I'd still rather avoid going round that loop too endlessly.

[Daniel(u1bd2005)]

would this open up the possibility of an auctions mod in the future?

[admin (no pm's please)]

I don't see it opens up such an option, as as far I can see an auction mod would be totally different.

The only relevant thing we will have gained is the experience with payment gateways.

[admin (no pm's please)]

email billing seems to be testing okay I think that is probably quite academic though, as I can't see why people would use the option?

But I do think that whilst keeping the shop simple, we do need to be fairly comprehensive in some areas.

In fact I am wondering if I need a big alteration to allow people to selected payment processor from a range. e.g. some people don't like paypal, and myff is actually setup to allow nochex,paypal and google checkout, so why not let people choose?