extensions « Wintivity

PayPal Plugins for Joomla

Posted by Mark Raborn in Joomla on 2010/02/17

Joomla PayPal Extensions

For those interested in Plugins using simple syntax to enable PayPal Buttons in articles, there are PayPal plugins for Joomla. Search the Joomla Extensions directory for offerings.

For WIGITAL Customers that want to take a do it yourself approach from within Joomla and do not wish to leave the Administrator backend to get PayPal functionality, there are two commonly used Joomla PayPal plugins we suggest:

Easy Paypal by HyBing

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/e-commerce/payment-systems/2651

HyBing Website
http://www.hybing.com/Easy-Paypal.html

Nice Paypal by TriniTronic

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/e-commerce/payment-systems/9277

TriniTronic Website
http://www.trinitronic.com/index.php/Downloads/downloads.html

Using the Joomla PayPal Extensions

Turn Off the TinyMCE Editor

The Joomla Document library discusses using PayPal type extensions in this post . The use of PayPal extensions require that HTML can be typed into web pages along with the specific code needed to interact with PayPal using PayPal’s API. The first consideration then, is to avoid the use of the default TinyMCE Editor in Joomla. TinyMCE strips out certain forms of HTML on save, and since the PayPal API requires custom HTML and various propriertary syntax to function, you must not use the default editor. Read this post to turn off TinyMCE.

Sign Up for Business PayPal Account

Receiving PayPal payments requires a PayPal Business Account. Sign up to “Build Your Business Online with PayPal”

For WIGITAL Customers, we suggest a dedicated PayPal email address and identitity in your environment. Whether in a Windows Domain and using Microsoft Exchange to receive notifications, or using an email service like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc… , having an identity dedicated to this function, “that is secure” and accessible only by Accounting and Management roles, is advisable.

Create an account / identity dedicated to the PayPal relationship
Sign up with PayPal Business

Easy PayPal Tutorial

http://www.hybing.com/Easy-Paypal-Tutorial.html

Nice PayPal Tutorial

http://www.trinitronic.com/index.php/Downloads/nice-paypal-button-documentation.html

Installing Joomla PayPal Extensions

Here are the steps to setup Nice PayPal ( as an example )

If you don’t already have one, sign up for a business PayPal account.
Install the plugin using Joomla’s Extension Manager.
Go to Extensions>>Plugin Manager and click into the plugin “Content – Nice PayPal Button.”
Enable the plugin.
Add your PayPal account email to the parameters on the right.
Optionally add your sandbox sellers account email if you plan to do testing.
Optionally set the test mode to on or off – the default is off.
Optionally enter your PayPal supported 3 letter currency code – default is USD.
Optionally, Enter your 2 digit country code to set the language used on the PayPal payment page. PayPal uses a two-character country code (ISO 3166). Some examples are United States: US, Great Britain: GB, France: FR, Spain: ES, Poland: PL, German: DE. If you don’t know your country code, or you can Google PayPal Country Codes.
Optionally, set your button language code. PayPal uses a 5 character code to designate language it’s buttons. For example, United States English is designated with en_US. Enter the 5 character code for the desired button language. Other code examples are Great Britain English: en_GB, French: fr_FR, Spanish: es_ES, Polish: pl_PL, German: de_DE. If you don’t know the code for your desired language, log into PayPal use the button creator and search the resulting HTML code for this https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_buynow_LG.gif. Notice the en_US in the URL, it’s the language code for the button.
Save your changes.
Important – Email Cloaking is a default feature of Joomla. Unless you have specifically disabled it, it is enabled on your site. If this is the case then, in the Plugin Manager, you will need to change the order of the Nice PayPal Button plugin so that it appears below the Email Cloaking plugin in the plugin list. Otherwise, the PayPal buttons that the Nice PayPal plugin creates won’t work properly.
Add the tag code {nicepaypal:button type|price|item name} to your article where you want the PayPal button to show up.

Place the Nice PayPal Button tag in your article content.

A PayPal button replaces the Nice PayPal button tag.

The PayPal Developers Site

For those interested in the DIY “Do It Yourself” approach that requires a little more investment than point-and-click in the Joomla back end, PayPal provides their API, development practices, documentation, sample apps, etc… at the PayPal Developers Network

An extraordinary amount of functionality can be achieved, integrated, and customized into your website using PayPal’s online tools. These tools require no knowledge of coding and can broaden website functionality with PayPal using simple cut and paste of code that PayPal generates on your behalf as you use their online resources.

In addition, you can go further as a developer.

Here are some important links ( and suggested reading )