PayPal Standard and Webform CiviCRM

[cudder23]

Hi,

I have some Drupal experience but I am totally new to CiviCRM and am looking to build a site for a small membership based non-profit.

A primary purpose of the website is to allow online applications and payments for 3 distinct types of Memberships in the organization: Full, Associate, and Student.

I'm afraid I'm feeling a bit lost as to how to get this done. I started by setting up 3 new Contact Types based on the preset Individual type (Full, Associate, Student). And once I understand it better, I will try adding CiviCRM custom fields to those Contact Types (to specify some relevant qualifications of prospective members).

And I have started reading the documentation here: (http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/organising-your-data/mapping-your-data/), but CiviCRM has a lot of fields as defaults for new members (for example the panel on "Communication Preferences" or the "Latitude/Longitude" entries in the "Address" panel).

The organization really wants to limit how much the prospective Member has to fill out when they apply for membership. In this thread: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,34564.0.html Coleman Watts suggested Webform-CiviCRM integration as a potential solution, and it does look like a good one.

As I understand it, you can create a Webform that will collect information and use it to create a new CiviCRM Contact. And you can make the Webform simpler than the default CiviCRM New Contact form.

But I just discovered the following on the Drupal project page:

Integrates with CiviContribute, but only supports on-site credit card payment processors at the moment. This notably excludes Paypal Standard and Stripe.

It's a small non-profit with a limited budget and they only have the PayPal Standard type of account, not PayPal Pro.

So, my main question is: Is there some other way to accomplish this, using PayPal Standard but also using Webform-CiviCRM integration to simplify the membership application?


For clarification, below is the client's needs/requests for the membership application process. In number 2 they proposed sending an email with a PayPal link, but I'm concerned this will separate the membership process from CiviCRM.

• Prospective Member fills out online form to apply for Associate or Student Membership
• If applicant fills in all required fields, and applicant address state is one of several local states, then applicant gets sent an automatic confirmation e-mail with instructions on payment, including a link to PayPal Standard for membership payment.[Alternative: Applicant is sent directly to PayPal instead of having to wait for email.]
• If state entered is not one of several defined local states, form content is simply sent to Admin to evaluate.
• If PayPal Standard payment is not made, Admin is notified (and CiviCRM sends reminders?)
• Once Membership payment is made at PayPal, New User Account is created for Member

[Coleman Watts]

You're in luck. PayPal standard feature is being added to Webform-CiviCRM right now, should be ready sometime next week.

[petednz]

Hey cudder23 - since you are drupal user, Would be good to see questions like this asked at drupal.stackexchange.com and help us all get these regular questions managed in a better way. If you don't already have one, would you set yourself up an account, maybe ask this or at least future questions over there, paste link back here, oh and of course 'commit' to area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/77367/civicrm

[cudder23]

That's great news Coleman. Thanks!

And I'd be happy to post at stackexchange. The last time I did my post was to general and asked too many questions for the moderators approval. I'll try again.

Thanks!

[cudder23]

I have committed to the CiviCRM site at StackExchange.

I have two questions/observations:

1. It appears that one cannot yet post questions at the CiviCRM StackExchange because it is still a proposal, not an official site. Is that correct?

2. I get the sense that drupal.stackexchange.com is discouraging CiviCRM questions.

A discussion here:

http://meta.drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/3134/how-to-get-rid-of-all-these-civicrm-questions?cb=1

contains responses to a question by Coleman about CiviCRM questions on drupal.stackexchange.

The moderators at drupal.stackexchange don't want questions there that are primarily or exclusively CiviCRM questions and which don't pertain to Drupal (other than that the person is running CiviCRM within Drupal).

For example:

I don't have problems with these unless they are so specific to CiviCRM to not be beneficial outside the CiviCRM community.

and

if anything is blatantly a civi-only question it shouldn't be asked. And if turns out not to be answerable from a Drupal point of view, it'll almost definitely be closed as off topic.

and

As long as your questions are not merely bugreports (I've seem at least one about MySQL syntax error...), hosting requests, etc, and are abut Drupal side of this issue, you are and will be welcomed here.

So, is it really OK to post questions like this at drupal.stackexchange.com? I'm asking about using a Drupal module, but the question is not really going to be useful to the general Drupal community. Right?

And I get the chicken and egg problem in that discussion: How does CiviCRM have enough activity on drupal.stackexchange.com to justify a separate civicrm.stackexchange.com site?

[Coleman Watts]

Hi Christopher, thanks for doing all that research. It sounds like you are well caught-up on the CiviCRM SE situation. Bottom line is that we are all very excited to start asking and answering Civi questions at SE, but are currently stuck in limbo until we get 100 people committed who have a high (200+) reputation on another SE site. The single most important thing you can do to help is to pick any SE site (I see you've chosen Drupal Answers) and start participating (which I see you have already done, that's great). Once you've reached 200 rep on that site, there are still a few ways to help:

• Encourage other people to commit to the proposal
• Help people who have committed build up their rep on SE

With such a great community behind this effort, I'm confident we'll be out of limbo and on to the beta phase at SE very soon. Onwards and upwards

[cudder23]

Thanks for the response, Coleman.

Not to get too far off topic, and to be sure I'm being clear, I think the idea of a CiviCRM Stackexchange is a great one. I just didn't want to post CiviCRM questions in Drupal Answers if they are not welcome, and I wasn't sure how welcome they are.

[Coleman Watts]

I think you've got a good grasp at this point of which types of questions are welcomed on that site. Now that you're at 23 rep how about posting some more (answering others' questions is great too!) so you can get to 200