How do I go about making a donation script, and which host would be the best for my site.

[find me]

Two questions, first is I want to go about making a donation script in php. One that will direct you to paypal after submitting the amount, then receive a message(to my database) when it is confirmed paid to the account. This way I can have an automated donation system that can update other stuff on the website and game for donators without me needing to confirm it. I wanna know how the process works, is it simple or is it more complex, and do they have template type scripts out for this already or is something that needs some more personal work.

The second question would be, what would be the best host for my website? All the site will have is a blog, a few single pages for information/pictures, and a forums. Not too much, but I want to make sure I get a good host. Last time we did this I had to contact the host a few times to have them set a couple setting for my site I didn't have access to so I could get the previous donation script working.

I don't know much about php, it's not my strong point. But I just need as much information on these two things as I can get as these are just as crucial as the rest of the project. And I want to make sure they are done right and not tooo sloppy haha.

[lazypenguin]

This is probably what you're looking for:

[url]https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_dcc_hub-outside[/url]

I've never integrated paypal into my sites so I can't give you any examples of implementations. It would probably work along the following line: get input from user, sanitize input, post to paypal api, wait for a response, once response received render a page accordingly. Since paypal would send you a response you could use that response in your site. IE, they said the transaction was successfully processed? Then you can take the user's input amount and add it to your donation.

[swift and shift]

class TransactionsController < ApplicationController
  include ActiveMerchant::Billing::Integrations
  load_and_authorize_resource except: :ipn
  
  def new
    @denominations = Transaction::DENOMINATIONS
  end
  
  def create
    @denominations = Transaction::DENOMINATIONS
    @transaction = Transaction.new params[:transaction]
    @transaction.user = current_user
    if @transaction.save
      @callback_domain = AppConfig[:public_url]
      @return_domain = AppConfig[:site_url]
      render "create"
    else
      @errors = @transaction.errors.full_messages
      render "new"
    end
  end

  def ipn
    notify = Paypal::Notification.new request.raw_post
    txn = Transaction.find notify.item_id
    if notify.acknowledge && notify.complete?
      txn.paypal_transaction_id = notify.transaction_id
      txn.save
      txn.user.credit += Money.new (BigDecimal.new(params[:mc_gross]) * 100).to_i
      txn.user.save
    end
    render nothing: true
  end
end