As a non-profit and charity, I’m often on the look out for tools and services that I can use for the BMTG website. However, apart from various sites offering to create free websites, there seems little in the way of help for such groups. However, there are two sites/companies that I’d like to recommend…

Memset
They host the BMTG website for free. All you pay for is your domain name, which you can buy elsewhere and point to their nameservers. Their service is excellent as if the quality of their hosting. Oh, and they’re carbon neutral

PayPal
They provide reduced charges to non-profits. Google Checkout doesn’t. Never-the-less the PayPal non-profit charges aren’t much more generous than the standard Google Checkout rate.

There is also Google for Non-profits, a collection of Google tools and sites. Unfortunately, it’s just that. And the link no longer appears to work, even though it was only launched a couple of months ago.

Google Grants offers 3 months of free advertising to, well, people them deem to be appropriate - submit your details and cross your fingers.

If you’re aware of any useful services for non-profits/charities, please let me know.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been looking at improving the eCommerce facilities on the BMTG website.

Up until now I’ve handled the handled the ticket availability via a combination of PHP and MySQL. The shopping basket and checkout has then been handled by PayPal. To add some more flexibility, though, I’ve been taking over the shopping basket. The coding was a little complicated but it’s done. I can now track multiple tickets in a basket, with options to change quantities and delete items from the basket. All well and good.

The next bit is to pass the basket entries to PayPal for final payment.

Oh lord.

The main PayPal site has “walk through” screens on how to add the code. But stuff is missing - but can be found in a 100+ downloadable PDF manual. Add to that the code they give you includes a broken link to a PayPal image.

So, now, I need to find a replacement “Checkout” graphic from PayPal. Could I find one. Could I heck. However, there was a news story about PayPal updating their graphics so I followed that and found a list of “before” and “after” images. That told me that PayPal generated images - such as the ones provided in the example code - would update automatically. The other option was to download replacement images and host them yourself. This wasn’t my preferred option, but I went for it anyway. Guess what? Yes, clicking on the link to download the image showed me the code that was required to host it from the PayPal site - exactly what I was after. But in no way obvious.

And that’s what I’ve found about the PayPal site in general - nothing is where you’d expect it to be and everything needs a good deal of searching to find.

Which is why most of the help can be found at the PayPal Developer Community - a group of official PayPal forums that I only came across via a Google search.

These forums mentioned that I could use the PayPal Sandbox for testing purposes. But could I find a link? No. A search on Google naturally lead me to a completely different site - PayPal Developer Central. And don’t even get me started on how complicated the Sandbox is to use…

So right now I’m frustrated to hell. My coding of the PayPal interface has barely started as I’ve spent all my time desperately trying to find answers to what I think are basic questions.

And after that… I’ve going to add Google Checkout as a second payment option. God help me.

The BMTG website now has an on-line ticket ordering system.

As it’s early days to see how much income it produces, I’ve gone for the easy option - a one way interface with PayPal, who are also providing simple cart facilities.

The ticket screen has been updated and a new MySQL back-end database has been introduced. The ticket screen now automatically produces ticket details, with PayPal links, for multiple shows. It will even remove a performance after the date has passed.

Longer term, if it all takes off, I might implement my own system where you can pick seats from a map, and we can control ticket availability. But that’s to come. Potentially.

Meantime I continue to “have discussions” with the committee over how much they charge customers for buying on-line.

A new year and lots more web work.

First of all, and the biggie, is adding on-line ticket sales to the BMTG site. All of this is being processed by PayPal. It’s now received committee approval and my final design has been tested today… hopefully it will all go live by the end of the week.

The back-end is a MySQL database containing two tables - one containing the ticket details and the other is a control table for the on-line charges. The ticket page then uses PHP to access the database and construct it’s content, including ticket tables, PayPal links and even writing the description at the top of the page to describe any processing fees (they currently intend to charge just a set charge per ticket bought on-line, but in case they want to do something more complex, such as add P&P fees or per-transaction fees, I’ve added that in).

However, how many sales it will generate I’m not sure about.. I remain sceptical (especially as there’s a 50p processing charge).

I’ve also changed the majority of the sites pages as I improve accessibility - nothing visually has changed, but a lot of code has been modified.

Meantime I’ve found a problem with my earlier change to make the YouTube code valid. It seems that when I blank the screen using script.aculo.us code, the YouTube video stays highlighted, getting the way of any photos displayed. This only occurs on one screen (the only one where video and photos are in close proximity) so I’ve had to change that back to the original YouTube code whilst I investigate further.