CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

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Civi 4.1 Stable, PayPal Standard

I must have wasted 2 days 'debugging' civicrm and paypal sandbox for donations and membership payment issues. In short I cannot get PayPal sandbox to provide a real test environment. Transactions are processed and I can manually fire off the IPN's. This worked for donation status completion - even though Civi log said it was complete and database updated.

When it came to membership testing thru sandbox no PayPal payments seemed to register back to CiviCRM - despite sandbox having them IPNs listed AND manually firing them off.

In both cases (Contribute and Memberships) I did a small real world live transaction which both worked first time giving a much needed boost to confidence in CiviCRM + PayPal Standard IPN

Conclusion: hasty maybe but either the PayPal sandbox is flaky or more likely there is an expectation/bug in Civi test drive transactions that stil need ironing out

Suggestion: It would be useful to have in the civi log test drives and statuses to provide a round trip sense of the process. INstead of

Feb 27 20:30:26  [info] Contribution record updated successfully

Feb 27 20:30:27  [info] Success: Database updated and mail sent

It would be much easier on the setup process if the log said something like:

Feb 27 20:30:26
 [info] Success:Test Drive Contribution record updated successfully - contact id XXX

 [info] Success:Test Drive Membership created for - contact id XXX

Feb 27 20:30:27  [info] Success: Test Drive email notification sent