Please replace the ??? with your data!

• Your URL: http://buylocalrmfu.org/sandbox/wordpress/give/
• The browser used: Firefox 2.0 + IE6
• cforms version: 6.2
• Your WordPress version: 2.2.3

[desc]: Hi Oliver,

 I've searched through forums, documentation, etc. for some help on this, but I'm afraid this is slightly over my head. If you visit the URL above you'll see a "donate" form generated by your plug-in. What I'd like to do is use your form to send a bunch of data to a PayPal payments page. The HTML below is what a really simply form should do in order to get the correct data to PayPal:

<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_xclick">
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="email@domain.com">
<input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Anonymous Donation">
<input type="hidden" name="amount" value="50.00">
<input type="hidden" name="page_style" value="Primary">
<input type="hidden" name="no_shipping" value="1">
<input type="hidden" name="no_note" value="1">
<input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD">
<input type="hidden" name="tax" value="0">
<input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US">
<input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-DonationsBF">
<input type="image" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_SM.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal – it's fast, free and secure!">
<img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
</form>

 Your plug-in makes it easy to change the form action, but how do I get the input fields on the "donate" form to match up with what PayPal is looking for? I've read some things about using cforms' "tracking tables" to store and manipulate data, but I'm not certain where these are and how I use them.

Can you help at least point me in the right direction? Thanks Oliver!

Oliver,

Thanks for your reply. I've got the hidden fields in place, but one of the hidden fields has an email address as a value, like so:

<input type="hidden" name="business" value="email@domain.com">

In the cformsII admin, the way I typed it is this:

business|email@domain.com

When I submit the form data to PayPal, it tells me the email address is invalid. Upon inspection of the source code, I see that the '@' symbol has been transformed to a % sign, so what PayPal is getting is:

<input type="hidden" name="business" value="email%domain.com">

Is there a way to preserve the @ symbol? I tried HTML character equivalents and placing the string in quotes, but no luck.

Also, I'm not sure what you meant in your reply by "one single line input field 'amount'". This may be outside of your realm, but what I'd like to do is let the user choose a donation amount from the dropdown menu and assign that option value to the "amount" hidden field. So if a user elects to donate $75, the "amount" hidden field would be:

<input type="hidden" name="amount" value="75.00">

I know you can work with variables via the cforms admin, but it looks like it's limited to WordPress custom fields. Is there a way to adjust the value of "amount" based on what is chosen via the dropdown menu? I.e., the associated hidden field would look something like:

amount|{option value from dropdown menu}

Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,

Ryan 

Oliver,

 I've got a basic form submitting to PayPal with the changes you gave. Thanks! However, I have another question. I have another form that offers three subscription rates via select menu. To get the option values sent to PayPal in the right form, the select menu has to look like this:

Oliver,

I'm not sure why my response was on a different thread… thanks for your creative solution – it works.

I've posted my solution below in case anyone else is looking to use cforms to send data to PayPal. I know there are millions of ways someone would want to submit data, and that this is just one. In my case, (deviating from the original problem with the select menu), I wanted to allow a user to enter a donation amount in a text input field. The way to do this normally is by using the following input field:

Note that the input name must be set to amount (lower case). Currently, cforms does not allow you to separate the label name from the input name; what that means is you either have a label that says "amount" – which in most cases won't look right to your site's visitors – or you have to do some CSS trickery.

In the cforms form-builder, the proper way to do it is to create two text input fields. The first one will have the label you want your users to see. In my case, this is "Gift Amount". The second will have the label "amount". The goal is to hide the ugly "amount" label, then shift the "amount" input box up, so it looks like it is associated with the "Gift Amount" label.

Here's how it looks in the cforms form-builder:

Note the second line uses a regular expression to verify that the user enters a dollar amount (100, 100.00, $100, or $100.00 format).

Without any CSS mods, you'll have two input fields on your screen:

Again, the idea is to hide the second label and shift the second input box up. I inserted the following CSS lines into cforms.css:

Be sure to replace "2" with the number of your form and "5" or "6" with the list item number (view source or look at the numbers on the far left of the form-builder to determine the list item number). You'll almost certainly have to adjust the margins and absolute positioning to get the input where you want – it depends on how you've got your form styled elsewhere.

The final result looks like so:

The results can be seen here.

Thanks for all your help Oliver.

Ryan

No problem. I actually found a better way of passing along data without doing any CSS madness. It requires enabling alternative form action (which I think has caused another issue me – see end of post) and pointing to a PHP file, which processes the form data. This PHP approach works really well if you need to capture the form data (have it sent to you in an email) and then send it to PayPal with the click of one "buy now" or "donate" button.

As it turns out, you need not worry about the field names at all, since you can change them in the PHP in one line. Suppose, as in the above example, that I want the label for my field to read "Gift Amount". If I turn on custom IDs, the field name will be "Gift_Amount"; e.g.:

<input type="text" value="$" name="Gift_Amount" … />

In the PHP file, all I need to do is assign this field name to the variable "amount":

$amount = $_POST['Gift_Amount'];

Because PayPal only understands a lowercase "amount", we have to make the variable name the same.

Below the PHP section is a new HTML page that redirects the user to PayPal and sends along the form data. If you're using unencrypted buttons, PayPal looks for the following line to determine the amount:

<input type="hidden" name="amount" value="50.00">

To dynamically change the amount, replace that line with:

<input type="hidden" name="amount" value="<?php echo $amount; ?>">

The amount is replaced with whatever amount you entered in the "Gift Amount" field above. I'm not sure how people can get in touch with me if they have questions, but there it is.

Now, I've been having trouble with field validation using this method. It worked, then it didn't, so I added regular expressions. I know you have a note about validation not working if you enable alternative form action, but shouldn't the form fail to send if I have required fields flagged and use regex? I suppose my real question is…what do you think could be wrong here?

Hi Oliver,

I actually duplicated the form and redid the validation and it worked fine. I'm not sure what the issue was, but everything is smooth now. Thanks so much for your help on this. I'm planning on setting up a weblog in the near future and I'd like to post my code-related findings on it. I'll come back here when it's set up and post a link so anyone who is interested can read a more indepth solution.

Sincerely,

Ryan 

Ryan,

Do you think you could send me the php file to integrate paypall with my form?

I would really appreciate it, I'm not a coder :)

You guys rock!!! I've been pulling my hair trying to resolve this

Thank you