A Slightly Difficult Question

[DaVuLf]

Hey there, I was wondering how to do the following.

I'm looking into setting up PayPal on my site, so that people can purchase memberships. The problem is that his doesn't collect any information from them. During the purchase process, I want to have them go through the sign-up process to create a forum username (unless they already have one) and then to designate that name as someone who had paid.

Essentially, I am a VP for a club on my campus, and we're trying to integrate online signups. We have a forum, and we want members to sign up as they pay for membership. We also would like to designate members who have paid via a little 'donor' type icon beside their name.

Is this possible?

Thanks,
DaVuLf

[trq]

Yes it is possible, you would just need to combine your [i]signup[/i] form with your [i]paypal[/i] form.

[DaVuLf]

Sounds simple enough, but how would I go about doing that? The main purpose here is that you don't need to pay to use the forums, but you do need to pay to gain access to certain areas. Additionally, I need to be able to designate who paid and who didn't.

How more or less would I implement this? I understand PHP to a pretty good degree, and I understand mySQL and the forum backend to some degree as well.

So I guess the question is then, how would I go about combining these two things?

[lessthanthree]

Well, you probably have a form handler page that sends all the payment stuff off to paypal, just put a process on that same page to add their details into your "members" table/db. You'll probably want to add a field to your members table to flag that they have paid, you can then use this to implement the "donor" icon....

[DaVuLf]

Okay, I can see sort of how to do the flag. I just add another field to the db, and then run a check for a 1 or 0. Got that, now, what do you mean about the first point?

I think I should give a quick example of how it is currently set up:

http://www.briancomeau.net/WDT/forum/membership.html

As you can see, there is a buy button there. When it is clicked on, it goes to the PayPal purchase area instead of where I want it to go.