Image by ~MVI~ (scrounging for photos) via Flickr

Big changes on the horizon. September will mark the end of 4+ years at my job in Rochester, NY and the beginning of a new job in our nations capitol Washington, DC. Yep, I’m taking this show on the road and will be moving the middle of September. New place, new people, new job… it’s all new and I think that’s what I need. Sometimes you just need to mix things up.

Things will most likely be quite for the next month or two as I do the actual moving and get situated in a new place, but I hope to get back to work shortly thereafter.

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Why is this important?

Some of you may be asking yourselves “what is Chris talking about? I’ve linked up my sign-up form so I’m done, right?” Unfortunately no, your not quite finished. The thing to keep in mind, when working with any kind of third party billing service, is that we’re talking about 2 separate and distinct systems. Your application is not aware of any changes/updates made in the billing system and vice verse.  This is a problem because if a users credit card expires in your billing system you need some way of notifying your application so you can suspend access. Or if your customer cancels their account in your application you need to be sure to update your billing system so they don’t continue to get charged.

This is the same concept when working with PayPal or any other 3rd party payment processor where the transaction takes place on their servers. We need a method for identifying accounts that have changed recently in our billing system so we can make any necessary updates in our application.

Listening for Changes

Spreedly is not shy about telling you when your customer data changes. In fact, when any of your subscribers change, Spreedly will POST a comma separated list of subscriber id’s (your customer id’s) to a URL which you specify. While tooling around your Spreedly accounts general settings you may have noticed a group of fields that start with “Subscribers Changed Notification URL”. This field is where you place the URL that Spreedly should use when POSTing changed accounts back to your application. This page can be part of your application or just a script that has access to  your database, but it needs to be there so that Spreedly has someone to talk to.

When any of your subscribers change within Spreedly, the application will send a POST request to an address you specify in your settings containing a comma separated list of IDs. These are the customer IDs of those subscribers who have changed. So this is Spreedlys way of telling you that account 2, 4, 6 and 8 have changed and you may want to check them out and update your DB accordingly.

As far as the necessary code, basically all we’re talking about is a method of a new or existing controller (using CodeIgniter) looking for the “subscriber_ids” POST variable and processing appropriately:

public function update_customers
{
	$ids = explode(',', $this->input->post('subscriber_ids'));

	foreach($ids as $id)
	{
		// get users data from Spreedly

		// update your DB with new data
	}
}

Pretty easy huh?

Why did this take so long?

This series set a new record for how long it’s taken me to wrap up a post series and I apologize for that. The reason though is because I’ve been taking a good long look at all the payment services out there (they’re popping up all over the place) and have determined that there are others I like better than Spreedly. So as I started to change my mind and focus I spent less time with this service and as a result was unable to share my knowledge as I had planned.

Currently Sign-Up-Sheet.com uses Chargify which won me over shortly after I started this series. However, I have since found another app that I like better called OpenGateway. The details as to why one is better than the other is for another post, but that’s what happened here. I got sidetracked by other options and simply was unable to regain my focus. Stay tuned for additional information on these payment options and let me know if you would like to see another series possibly on OpenGateway (which coincidentally happens to be built on CI) in the comments.

That’s all folks

And that does it for the Spreedly guide. My apologies for taking so long to complete but things got away from me a bit and one thing lead to another. If you think there is something I didn’t cover or have any additional questions please let me know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Speedy Subscriptions Using Spreedly (Part 2) – Account Configuration
2. Speedy Subscriptions Using Spreedly (Part 3) – The Sign-up Process
3. Speedy Subscriptions Using Spreedly (Part 1) – Overview & Account Setup

CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development is a complete soup to nuts overview of the CI framework. Coming in at 10 chapters and around 260 pages this book is perfect for those new to CI. The book starts out with reviewing CIs MVC architecture, system libraries and form validation techniques. Then the author dedicates 2 chapters to user authentication and walks you through building your own authentication solution (includes details on oAuth and Facebook Connect). Application security, large scale development and extending CIs core is also covered in later chapters. All in all this book provides a very well rounded sampling of topics for complete newbies and experienced developers alike.

The one chapter I found most informative was chapter 8 Web Services. Like most developers, I have done quite a bit of work with consuming APIs but never had to write one of my own. Recently however I was charged with the task of writing an API that other developers would be interacting with and I had to stumble along and come up with my own solution. In chapter 8 the author reviews web services in depth and how to create your own REST service using CI. Very helpful for those new to that particular topic.

To be honest, when I first received the book I was a little disappointed. I’m not a CI beginner so I was hoping for a lot more advanced items, answers to questions I’ve been struggling with myself. But after spending some time with the book and writing this review I think I have changed my tune. The author spends ample time on the basic stuff but also finds time to touch on more advanced topics like user authentication (with oAuth and Facebook Connect), application security and web service development.

If you are a professional web worker who uses CI in your day to day activities then you should consider getting this book. There is a little something for everyone.

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http://sign-up-sheet.com

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Quick Disclaimer

Spreedly has a full featured API which provides people with programming experience a greater amount of integration flexibility, you just need to be conscience of the security liabilities involved. Links to 3rd party libraries and documentation can be found on the Spreedly website. To save on time and get this series wrapped up I will not be reviewing the API.

Your Sign-up Process

Before we can get to the Spreedly side of things we first need to define how our sign-up process is going to work. It is in our best interests, as the business owners, to make our sing-up process as quick and simple as possible so that more people will purchase accounts. Smashing Magazine published a post or two on sign-up form design a while back and I recommend you refer to those poses for further information on designing your process.

The one thing I will say, as it pertains to process, is to keep your sign-up form short and sweet. We will be redirecting users to our Spreedly accounts for the actual financial transaction so don’t worry about collecting any of that data (address, CC info, etc.) on your form. Just collect the items that are vitally necessary to get the user setup and worry about the non-essentials after they log-in for the first time.

Prerequisites

As I mentioned above, we don’t need to worry about collecting any financial information on our website because all the financial transaction stuff will be handled by Spreedly. However, there is one bit of data that we need to keep track of in order to redirect our users over to Spreedly and that is the subscription plan ID. The way I have chosen to handle this is by creating a table in my applications database to hold a copy of my subscription plans and each plan will include their Spreedly ID. Come to find out I needed to create this table anyway to track the limits of each subscription plan and hold my users to the limits of the account they purchased. So in reality I simply added an additional column to this table to hold the Spreedly ID.

Now you can chose to handle this any way that works for you and your application, but the bottom line is you simply need to be able to keep track of the subscription plans you have setup in Spreedly and the unique ID that has been assigned to them.

Constructing the Subscribe Link

So now that we have our subscription process down and have defined a place to keep track of our subscription plans and their IDs on the application side we can start looking at how exactly we will be linking to Spreedly.

Spreedly makes it somewhat difficult to find your subscription plan ID so you have to go looking for it. When you are logged into your account, click Plans to view your subscription plans and click the name to edit it. The edit screen, which is shown above, allows you to make changes to your subscription plan. If you look at the URL of this page you will be able to find the ID of your subscription plan. It’s the number displayed between “subscription_plans” and “edit”. That’s the number you will need to keep track of on your application side. You should also take  a look at their documentation links in the box on the right side of the page which also reviews linking to subscription plans from your application.

OK, so now that we have our subscription plan IDs we need to determine what the URL is going to look like.

https://spreedly.com/signupsheet/subscribers/84736/subscribe/1019/screen-name-for-84736

The URL displayed above is a sample URL for the basic subscription plan.  Let’s take a look at this URL piece by piece to figure out what we need to modify:

• https:// – very important for security purposes. Since we are working with credit cards plain old http is forbidden.
• spreedly.com – as I’ve already mentioned, all the financial stuff is happening on the Spreedly servers and this is the proof.
• signupsheet – this is your unique account short site name. This can be modified on the Site Details screen under Configuration.
• subscribers/84736 - the number 84736 is the ID of the user or account in OUR system. So this number if the first thing we will customize. I recommend setting it to the unique identifier you use in your application to identify your accounts or users. Whatever is the root account level entity within your application. Be sure not to omit the “subscribers/” either, this identifies the ID your passing to Spreedly.
• 1019 – this is the subscription plan ID. This is the next thing we will customize depending on the subscription plan our user is purchasing.
• screen-name-for-84736 – this is a unique user/account name that we provide Spreedly. This is the last thing we will customize. Set this to whatever you wish, perhaps some combination of account name and ID. Whatever will make it easy for you to identify the account within Spreedly by name instead of ID.

So that’s it. All URLs will be the same except for the 4 pieces identified above (in red): your short site name, an account/user ID from your system, the subscription plan ID and a user/account screen name. By customizing those segments you should now be able to successfully redirect your users to Spreedly for credit card processing.

Passing Additional Data

It’s also worth mentioning that you can pass additional data to your Spreedly subscription pages like the subscribers name and e-mail address. If you are already collecting this data on your applications sign-up form it would be helpful if these fields were already filled in on the subscription page. You can easily pass this data along to Spreedly by adding some GET variables onto the URL we constructed above:

• email=someone@someplace.com
• first_name=someone
• last_name=special

If we use the above GET variables to pass additional information to our subscription forms, then our final Spreedly URL is going to look something like this:

https://spreedly.com/signupsheet/subscribers/84736/subscribe/1019/screen-name-for-84736?email=someone@someplace.com&first_name=someone&last_name=special

That’s all there is to it. Once the user inputs their credit card information they will be redirected to the URL which you specified in the subscription plan settings. You can also modify this on the fly by providing an additional GET variable to your URL: return_url. Using that variable you can dynamically redirect the user wherever you specify upon successfully completing the payment process. This comes in handy if you need to pass any kind of dynamic information along with your user when they are redirected back to your site.

What’s Next?

If you followed along you should now be up and running with using Spreedly to manage your applications payment processing. You may however notice one thing is missing… we have no way of knowing whether the payment was processed successfully or not. The user simply gets redirected where we say and that’s it. We also have no way of knowing when their subscription expires (unless we track that ourselves). In the next post I will look at how we open up the lines of communication between Spreedly and our applications so that we know more about whose paying and whose not.

Related posts:

1. Speedy Subscriptions Using Spreedly (Part 2) – Account Configuration
2. Speedy Subscriptions Using Spreedly (Part 4) – Checking for Updates
3. Speedy Subscriptions Using Spreedly (Part 1) – Overview & Account Setup

Features

Oneliners gives you a super simple clean interface to manage little bits of content. By “little bits of content” I’m referring to nothing more than a sentence long. Using the module you can group your content into logical groupings and then display those groups using variables in your templates. In the template you can control the order and number of records returned by the module.

Demo

Requirements

Oneliners is an ExpressionEngine module which requires ExpressionEngine 2.0.1+.

Installation

1. Download the latest version of the Oneliners module.
2. Extract the .zip file.
3. Copy the Onliners folder to your /system/expressionengine/third_party directory.
4. Open the Module Manager.
5. Install the Oneliners module.

Usage

The control panel side is pretty self explanatory, refer to the demo video above for more details. There is only one variable pair available with this module and it is describe below:

lines

{exp:oneliners:lines group_id="1"}
<p>{line}</p>
{/exp_oneliners:lines}

Lines can be used to show all the lines belonging to the provided group ID. This variable pair has one required attribute: group_id. This attribute references the ID of the of the Onliner group you wish to display.

Order Parameter

You can specify the order in which your lines are displayed by including the optional “order” parameter:

{exp:oneliners:lines group_id="1" order="rand"}

Choices for the “order” parameter are:

• {exp:oneliners:lines order=”alpha”}
• {exp:oneliners:lines order=”id”}
• {exp:oneliners:lines order=”rand”}

Limit Parameter

You can specify the number of lines you wish to display by including the optional “limit” parameter. If this attribute is not provided then all lines for the specified group will be displayed.

{exp:oneliners:lines group_id="1" limit="3"}

Free to Use

Feel free to download this module and use it for yourself. Post a comment if you have any issues or ideas on how to improve.

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• sold BadgeTracker to a great bunch of folks back in January
• kicked off re-development of Sign-Up-Sheet.com in January… relaunching next month (hopefully)
• been desperately trying to keep up with the personal MBA business crash course (to no avail)

Mostly I’ve been trying to work on my new outlook, or master plan, that I mentioned in my last post. So far so good… very excited about relaunching Sign-Up-Sheet.com next month. And thanks to Sign-Up-Sheet I have a bunch of new things to share with you right here on the blog in the coming months.

Keep your eyes out for new posts as well as some other bits and bytes I’ve been working on. Stay tuned!

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To program, or not to program that is the question

If you have spent any time on this site or on LOCCs you will have some idea of the projects I’m involved with. I developed BadgeTracker about 5 years ago, Sign-Up-Sheet.com followed about a year or two later accompanied most recently by myScoutPath and ScoutMailer. Contrary to most entrepreneurs I actually found my niche after I had developed a product. BadgeTracker was developed quickly and gained a following and after a little research I determined that the scouting industry was an attractive market to compete in so I selected it as my niche. The products that followed were aimed at scouts first and other groups second and I saw that as having great potential.

The problem here, that I didn’t realize until just recently, is that I had taken on too much. While I do outsource some work to contractors I am the only programmer, support person and business administrator I got. That means that while I’m answering support e-mails development stops. While I’m following up on overdue invoices no one is following up with the sales leads. While I’m programming no one is marketing. This lead to having 3 or 4 mediocre projects/products that were moving forward at a snails pace.

I had jumped head first into any idea that popped into my head, investing time and money to get it online and then ran out of resources to sustain, support and grow them. This lead to a great deal of frustration on my part because I was unable to work on the things I wanted to work on, investigate new ideas and opportunities or even write on my blog because I was stuck in the muck.

Wait… where’s the money?

Some of you may be wondering why I didn’t hire a staff or assistants to help maintain some of this. The short answer is the money wasn’t there. While the scouting industry may have looked like an attractive market at first, I have found over the years that working with non-profits is somewhat complicated and making a sale is difficult needle to thread. So while I was making some money it wasn’t enough to hire help or even leave my day job to dedicate more time. All of this of course contributed to more frustration on my part which is a very unproductive mind set to be in.

Recovery

What this all boils down to is not having a good vision and plan in place for the business. I should have slowed things down and investigated new ideas a bit more before jumping in a starting development and I should have finished one thing before starting another. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired so I think it’s time for a new plan.

The one thing that all great businesses have in common is  great products. There are plenty of businesses out there with mediocre products and they come and go each year along with whatever is “in” at the time. I have decided that I’m not content with creating mediocre products… I’m out to create a great product and doing that requires focus. So I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to “reboot” and start 2010 with a new plan/vision. I think Dr. Charles Emerson Winchester III, from M.A.S.H, put it best when he said “I do one thing at a time, I do it very well and then I move on.” This probably means some of my many projects and ideas may be discontinued or abandoned to drift with the current but I’m confident that this is a better approach than what I have been trying.

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More soon!

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