CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

My immediate goal is to get some attention to this question: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,29449.0.html

i.e. some kind of documentation or insight about the underlying model of how recurring payments are supposed to work and how to modify that for my needs in creating a new payment processor extension. My best guess at this stage is that I need to make use of a hook to post mangle the contribution status value, but it all kind of makes me think there's a bigger issue here that needs attention, so I'm posting this here, now.

I think it's fair to say that money is one of those issues that we're all mostly afraid to raise in polite company. It's not just a CiviCRM issue - there's a lack of transparency and no standard model for how payment processing should work, and I know there's even now new ideas and methods bubbling up ...

I do think that payment processing in CiviCRM is in need of an overhaul. Particularly now that we've got a new more sophisticated accounting model and a beautiful new extension model which means that there's a new collection of payment processors being generated, all of which rest on an underdocumented interface [want an example of what can go wrong? http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,29415.msg126198.html#msg126198]. In Drupal, the guy who built Ubercart abandoned it and started fresh with Drupal Commerce, and some kind of equally radical rebuild is what I'm thinking.

Has this conversation already started somewhere?