Spotlight

Chase Paymentech Module for Ubercart

Submitted by jesse on

Announcing the uc_chasepaymentech module for Ubercart!

This is a module that adds Chase Paymentech hosted checkout as a payment method to Ubercart. There isn't currently a module that integrates Ubercart with Chase paymentech. Although Chase based their hosted checkout on Authorize.net's framework, their specific implementation and methods of response verification are slightly different in functionality. There is not a sensible way to go about modifying the Authorize.net module that ships with Ubercart to incorporate Chase Paymentech without rewriting the entire Authorize.net module to make it more generic and adaptable to other Payment Companies and their implementations of the authorize.net framework. However, this may be an option for the future.

Ubercart as a donation system + Moneris as a Payment Gateway

Submitted by jesse on

Hopefully this blog entry will help a few people overcome some of the hurdles in setting up a donations system. We are a drupal shop so all the following is for drupal 6.

In this case the client simply wanted to have a way to collect donations from supporters of their political campaign. The only real constraint was that it needed to integrate with the Moneris payment gateway system. I was looking at creating a custom donation system and integration to Moneris, but in the end opted to use Ubercart. Ubercart is an awesome beast of a Shopping cart system that has many great features and useful contribs, 90% of which I did not need to take advantage of. However, Ubercart, in an extremely stripped down form, looked like it could offer everything I needed in terms of accepting and tracking donations. There was also an existing UC Moneris contrib module that looked pretty simple.

What you will find in this blog

The "CLUMPS" module

Submitted by jesse on

Clumps is a module that I have just written and will eventually be releasing. Its currently about 90% finished. The name was hastily chosen from a google search for a synonym to section. It is also still up for debate so feel free to comment if you can think of a good name.

All relatively good ideas start with a relatively complex, or annoying, problem.

Protagonist:

A site was required that split off into two separate sides with different paths say /sideone and /sidetwo. Most content is to be different, but some should be shared including menus and menu items. Doesn't sound like a very complicated problem does it? The content that is different will obviously be easy in that you can set the url aliases to /sideone/page1, /sidetwo/page2, etc.

Problem:

The complicated part comes when you consider how to maintain that context separation of which side you are on for the shared content. In this case the shared content had to be prefixed with the /sideone or /sidetwo. Regardless, there are a couple tricky problems here:

  1. how do you know which side of the site you were working on once you've gone to one of the shared pages?
  2. For that matter how do you have a menu display only the relevant items for a particular side as well as the shared items?
  3. How do you have the shared menu item knowledgeable about the context of which side of the site you are on?

Just Vision

Submitted by Jason on

Just Vision is an organization that, through award-winning media, community outreach and an array of educational tools, informs, connects and engages people in Palestinian-Israeli civilian efforts to resolve the conflict nonviolently.  Screenshot of the Budrus site at Justvision.org

OpenConcept was lucky enough to work with this passionate organization to help them develop a truly unique Drupal-based website.

Just Vision had previously implemented another CMS solution and as such, had an existent, complex database that linked interviews from a diverse selection of 'peacebuilders' on a variety of themes. Developing the appropriate taxonomies and linking interviews with themes, footnotes, glossary terms and profiles was challenging but something that Drupal was able to handle well using content types and taxonomies.

You can visit the Just Vision website at http://www.justvision.org

Upgrading Drupal sites

Submitted by stevem on

This is a very rough outline of my approach to updating Drupal sites. Note that it assumes both that no core files have been customized and that you have command-line access to a Unix or GNU/Linux system.

1. Set up a working directory (or use an existing one)

mkdir drupal_upgrade

cd drupal_upgrade

2. Download and untar the new version(s) of Drupal

wget http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/drupal/files/projects/drupal-4.7.4.tar.gz

tar xvf drupal-4.7.4.tar.gz

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