Upcoming Events
San Francisco CiviCRM Meetup - February 8th, 2012
February 8th, 2012
Come meet others from the Bay Area who are interested in, using or developing (more...)
UK usergroup - London meetup
February 8th, 2012
Come and meet others from the UK that are using CiviCRM or are interested in (more...)
London user and administrator training
February 23rd, 2012
A comprehensive two day hands on training course covering the configuration, (more...)
CiviCRM London sprint Feb 2012
February 27th, 2012
Following the CiviCRM training here in London, we will have a CiviCRM code (more...)
UK South West - CiviCRM Meetup
March 20th, 2012
Come meet others from the Area who are interested in, using or developing for (more...)
[Bristol, UK] user and administrator training
March 21st, 2012
A comprehensive hands on training course covering the configuration, (more...)
San Francisco user and administrator training
March 29th, 2012
A comprehensive two day hands on training course covering the configuration, (more...)
CiviCRM Usability, Test and Code Sprint - San Francisco (March 2012)
March 29th, 2012
This usability, code and test sprint is targeted at CiviCRM users and (more...)
CiviCon 2012 San Francisco Bay Area - April 2nd 2012
April 2nd, 2012
CiviCon is THE annual event bringing together the people who use, develop, (more...)
CiviCRM Documentation, Test and Code Sprint - after CiviCon San Francisco (April 2012)
April 4th, 2012
This sprint is targeted at CiviCRM users and developers who want to work on (more...)
CiviCRM Components
Tools for engaging your supporters...
Developer perspective of Google Checkout vs Paypal Pro/Standards
- Not Just a Contact Database
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These optional components give you more power to connect and engage your supporters.
civiCASE
Case management for clients and constituents.
civiCONTRIBUTE
Online fundraising and donor management.
civiEVENT
Online event registration and participant tracking.
civiMEMBER
Online signup and membership management.
civiMAIL
Personalized email blasts and newsletters.
civiREPORT
Report generation and template management.
We've integrated support for Google Checkout in CiviCRM v1.7. This was primarily on the initiative and lead of Deepak, part of our awesome India developement team. This also allowed us to compare the ease of use and integration between the two transaction providers. Here are some things we found:
- PayPal has a much richer and more well thought out SDK. They do quite a few things right from a developers perspective, primarily allowing the code to set various defaults (like the return url)
- Have the Google Checkout folks tried to use the sandbox with the awful "sandbox" background that they use. Makes it fairly hard to read and navigate the site
- PayPal is a lot more consistent and symmetrical with the urls and images between the sandbox and development environment. Google Checkout is not symmetrical
- PayPal gives u a much better unified testing environment. You have multiple test accounts under one large sandbox account. With Google you have to create multiple google accounts to test
Overall, PayPal was better and easier to integrate than Google. Hopefully Google will improve and add more features including recurring transactions etc over the next few months
Comments
Several Screens for an Event?
I like all the things you can do with an event, but is it necessary to go through so many screens both to create one AND to register for one?
Even in cases where there is no fee?
I think the model of one-page event creation like at Upcoming.org, Craigslist.org, Democrats.org, My.BarackObama.com, etc. -- and ONE-Button registration (!!!) is more likely to attract participants.
Event Complexity ...
I dont think having several screens to "create" an event is a big issue. Our model was more of an org having a few events in a month/year rather than lots of events.
I think having a simple one page event register screen for free events is something useful and would increase signup rate etc. A contribution to implement this would be great and much appreciated :) (paid events are a different matter since they involve confirmation with the payment processor etc)