Luke, if you have time, I’d love to hear more about the site. Is the ad submission process an automated one? Like if I go to Place an Ad and then click submit will it automatically show up? Or is it a manual process that an admin would need to log in and ok the ad?
I’m look to design a small niche site where people could do this very same thing, only not with advertising job openings, so I’m very curious as how this was built. If you don’t mind sharing that is.
I think I’ll write up something for a jambor-ee blog post, if that’s cool.
Deron, in brief, yes ad submission is automated (after payment). What happens is:
- User clicks ‘place an ad’, this actually logs them in as a dummy user and takes them to the stand alone entry form (as anonymous weblog entries, or register-on-SAEF-submit aren’t that doable).
- On form submission, the ad is stored in the DB with status ‘unpaid’ and the user goes to a ‘thanks, now go pay at PayPal page’ (they can return to this page at any time in the next 30 days to complete payment, or renew their ad).
- At this point the custom module silently creates a Simple Commerce product that can be bought via PayPal (ie you can ‘buy’ an entry).
- If the user goes and pays at PayPal, PayPal sends an IPN back buying the SC product which changes the ad entry’s status from Unpaid to Paid, and it appears on the site, emails go out & I don’t touch anything :)
All credit for gluing the weblog entries to the SC module and the activation process must go to Andy tho :)
I am also building a job board though I can’t link to it. I thought about doing this the same as all the other job boards out there (no login requirement) by attempting an anonymous login to the SAEF but that seemed a little too hackish to me. Also I would rather have the member info tagged to the purchases. Do you think a siple registration and login is too much for the user to go through?
Certainly the less steps the better but my thoughts were that I don’t have to totally mimic all the other job boards out there. One possible reason they do not require a login (besides taking less steps to post a job) is that the script would be much more expensive to build with a member management system. Sites like TechCrunch are running off a simple CMS that do not have good member management systems that can be tapped into such as offered by a bundle of EE and the simple commerce module.
I am not saying that you don’t have a good solution, I am just trying to rationalize my decision of using a registration and login process. Besides, having a no login solution would be more work.
I think if the users are willing to post to the board (and pay a decent fee to do so) they would not be totally turned off by the login and registration process.
Very nice site. I was interested to read when you said this though :
Deron, in brief, yes ad submission is automated (after payment). What happens is:
- User clicks ‘place an ad’, this actually logs them in as a dummy user and takes them to the stand alone entry form (as anonymous weblog entries, or register-on-SAEF-submit aren’t that doable).
I was wondering how do you get the system to log someone in as a dummy user? Is there some easy way of doing this. I only ask as there is something on a site that I am making at the moment and it may or may not work for me to be able to auto-log people in with a simple account instead of them having to sign up for a new account so was wondering how you went about doing that.
Also with the PayPal IPN part do you have any information on how IPN works. I have read a lot of the information on PayPals site but have never totallg gotten my head around it and would love to know a simple way of just doing the following :
1 - Add items to the PayPal cart.
2 - Customer pays for items.
3 - PayPal sends back some information that I already sent to it via the cart such as an ID number.
4 - I can then use that information from within a script to change database settings or the such.
Also how reliable is it using IPN. Does PayPal ever muck up and not send back the data?
Sorry for all the questions but it seems as though you have a very nice and elegant solution to problems that have eluded me for quite a while now and I would love to be able to get an insight into parts of how you did it and any help at all would be greatly appreciated.
Good luck with the site as I’m sure it should be a great success and having all the big players on board such as Mark Boulton etc should really help to sell your site. Well done again!!
Just to pop in my two-cents worth here. My personal take on this kind of thing is that people posting a job might not ever come back and post another one so getting their details isn’t the most important part of the operation, getting their money is though!!
I think that most people are only ever going to make a couple of posts or so and this would probably hinder them so much that it might put them off a little too much. I think that the way Luke has it setup seems like a really neat and easy solution.
Saying that though, I think that if maybe you were offering a process for large Agencies to post jobs or other companies that might post lots at once and also be a continued customer then it might make sense to enable some kind of member process.
I think as long as the person has paid and is getting what they have paid for then you will pretty much have everything that you need right there. The client is happy, you have your payment and your website is one post better off. You will probably get most of the information that you need anyway from the PayPal account so hopefully should be enough to enable you to fill in your accounts correctly!!
Anyway I will stop rambling now as I have probably bored most of the population of the EE forums half silly with my ravings!!
Glad you like it! To briefly answer your questions:
Mark Bowen - 16 May 2007 04:29 AM
I was wondering how do you get the system to log someone in as a dummy user?
Well, the user still has to act to log themselves in. So you just hard code the username and password as hidden inputs and have a button in some form which the user clicks, gets the redirect page, and they are logged in.
Also with the PayPal IPN part do you have any information on how IPN works.
I would say “consult PayPal’s docs” but that would be akin to asking you to bash your head against a brick wall for a good hour or ten
Unfortunately I’m afraid its something you will need to suss out for your particular situation. IPN isn’t 100% reliable 100% of the time (during development PayPal’s site went through phases of giving 500 errors for their entire site which messed up the IPN’s sometimes), but its probably ‘good enough’ for most smaller-scale applications.
Sorry I can’t be more detailed, but there’s a lot of info out there, its just a shame that the quantity is probably inversely proportional to its quality
My own take on IPN is that it can’t be 100% reliable as Luke mentioned. This is one of the reasons why I believe the registration and login system would be better. You have the user information and you know which user posted a certain job.
However, keep in mind that as long as you have the user info from the initial job posting then you should be fine because Paypal will also give you user info.
I am still on the fence as to which direction to go. I have yet to read the full article though so maybe that will change my mind.
Is it possible Luke you can repost your article on your job posting site that you wrote for Jambor-EE here? Those that want to learn more on job posting How-To’s would be interested and Jambor-EE has been down for a long time.
