Okay folks, especially those of you who use cpCommerce, many of you know that PayPal has yet to be included in the version 0.07rc1. Well, I downloaded the documentation a few days ago and MAN DOES IT SUCK! Especially from a programmer/developer position and here is my list on why!
- You have WAY TOO MUCH useless information! I do not need to know how it all works! All I want is a nice table that describes the information you expect from my application, and what I should expect in return from you. Pure and simple, that is all I need.
- This is partially related to Issue #1 as no one wants to read 72 pages of information. Hell, I do not even want to read 4 pages. I want a table of variable names, their restrictions, and a comment describing their usefulness to you!
- Considering this manual is “for developers”, it hardly reflects such. The manual has been nothing but a headache for me and I gave up trying to work with you! Why should I bother to put forth so much time finding all your hidden details in a 72 page document!
Okay, so really I only had 1 issue and expressed it 3 ways. Honestly PayPal, how can you provide such a useless document to us? Why not give us exactly what we need to accomplish the task at hand? A variable table for IPN, another table of PDT, etc. It can’t be that hard to produce or maintain!
Now, on a personal note, my day has been good. I woke up around Noon as Kami came over for lunch, and I then played golf for a while, ate dinner, went on a 4.2 mile bike ride, then setup a basketball hoop for Kami’s siblings. YES! Their Dad finally got one for them. I was shocked myself when I saw it. It took us till 9:30 PM to get it up (about two hours) and then we played hoops for a while making sure that when we threw the ball at it, it didn’t come crashing down. 
Luckily it survived our testing, or else we would all be very disappointed.
After a few minutes of throwing a ball into a hoop, Kami and I headed back to my house to watch some good old television and to cuddle. I love that time :), it is very well spent. My day was pretty laid back today, nothing more than the above.
6 comments ↓
There is actually 136 pages.
Well, I have two documents. 1) “PayPal Order Management Integration Guide” (72 pages) and 2) “PayPal Website Payments Standard Integration Guide” (136 pages). Both of them in my opinion suck!
I did look at both documents and yes I do agree with you. As a developer point of view a lot of things is just plain useless. Again this is a document for standard users.
Just awful!
So I go to the Instant Payment Notification section and click on Manual which points me to the “Website Payments Standard Integration Guide”. I then find the section on IPN which is three sentences on of which is.
To learn more about IPN, see the Order Management Integration Guide.
But there is no way to find the “Order Management Integration Guide” from paypal. So in desperation I go to Google and the only two references in the entire world is one at paypal and this web page.
For your convenience, I posted the Order Management Guide for you. You can get it here. I tried finding it on PayPal again, but had no success, so I just uploaded the copy I had.
you’re so right…paypall documentation is a pure waste of bandwidth to download… after one whole day of trying to find a complete list of IPN variables, I gave up finally, and just made a test script to record whole POST paypal makes to my script when using IPN… and then made a payment and looked up what actually comes to me… maybe not the kewlest, but it’s the simplest solution IMHO..
And another stupid thing with paypal is the way they expect you to test scripts, by making real payments, and then refunding each…Why in the world is so hard to them to provide a single test-only url, or dummy credit card numbers for this purpose ???
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