I’m a fan of all operating systems, Windows, Linux, and OSX. I just happen to make all these videos I post on a Macbook.. an old late 2006 model, that just couldn’t keep up anymore. I’ve had to retire it, and am excited to be doing these on a new Macbook Pro. I haven’t missed the spinning pinwheels of death one bit. Hopefully this means I can up the production value a bit.. only time will tell.

So this week, just a quick sneak peak at a feature that a lot of people have been asking for.. We call it, Loginless Payments. It’s difficult enough at times to get customers to pay, so this is all about making it as easy as possible to collect, and providing a great customer experience at the same time. A customer may have forgot their password to login, but it’s no longer an obstacle because we have eliminated that step entirely.

When a customer gets an invoice in their email, a special link is provided to pay that invoice. It doesn’t log them into their client area, but it does let them pay without having to login. This link is included in all payment reminders and late notices as well. Click, pay, done.

The video is below, as usual you can make the video full screen, and be sure to turn on your sound (And turn it up! This one turned out a little on the quiet side for some reason).

In the last developer commentary we took a look at creating a Merchant Gateway to process credit card payments in version 3. Today we’ll do the same for a Non-Merchant Gateway, which allows you to accept payments processed on the payment gateway processor’s own site (think PayPal).

Non-Merchant gateways are really quite basic. There are essentially two elements at play:

1. Creating an HTML form to handle the payment button (NonmerchantGateway::buildProcess() method)
2. Processing logic to handle the payment notification response from the gateway processor (NonmerchantGateway::validate() method)

The video is below, as usual you can make the video full screen, and be sure to turn on your sound.

It’s been a busy week, which is pretty normal.. but extra busy because we’re a man down right now. Tyson does great work here, and the Superior Court of California thought he would do a great job as a juror too. I’m sure he will, and we hope to have him back from jury duty next week to hear all about it. (And also to get back to cranking on Blesta!)

I get a lot of email and phone calls about Blesta, and in talking with people, certain things start to stand out.. like the incredible need for a downloads section in the client area. I was happy to tell several people this week that it will be included in v3.

And then I realized that we haven’t really mentioned this before.

The download manager is a plugin, and here’s what it looks like installed in the staff interface..

Here’s the link it registers in the client interface where all the downloady-goodness appears..

Other plugins can register links here too. So there you have it! Downloads ship with v3.

Thanks for reading, I hope you have a wonderful weekend!

Cody did a developer commentary a couple weeks ago on Merchant Gateways, you might find it interesting if you’re a developer (Hey maybe even if you aren’t!).

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ve already seen parts of the dashboard (For the 1st time in the Staff Calendar video). This time, I wanted to dig in a little deeper and show you how it works, and how flexible & customizable it really is.

If you stick with me, I have some new themes to show you toward the end too.

Some notable items..

1. The dashboard consists largely of widgets. Widgets are plugins which can be created by developers, dropped in and installed.
2. Widgets can be moved around, minimized and customized, unique to the staff account. Everything stays where you left it.
3. Since widgets are plugins, they can register and be included in the staff group ACL (Access Control List). This provides for better separation of staff roles.
4. GeoIP can be enabled in the settings, giving Blesta and all plugins access to geolocation data. The System Overview widget we’ll ship with makes use of it.
5. Drag and drop is awesome.
6. Themes are now extremely flexible, we’ve improved them more since the video we did on them. If you really want to get crazy you can (Warning, may induce vomiting).

The video is below, as usual you can make the video full screen, and be sure to turn on your sound.

In this developer commentary, I give a quick tutorial on creating a merchant gateway that supports credit card payments.

As you’ll see in the video, I’ve created a demo gateway to help streamline the process. This, and other payment gateway demos will be made available to developers at the launch of alpha, along with our detailed developer documentation.

We’re really excited about the payment gateway architecture, and after watching this tutorial I hope you will be too. If you’d like to learn more about why the gateway system is designed the way it is, read my post on Designing a Modular System.