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.

Last weeks post was titled Tangible Invoices. If you haven’t read it yet, you should check it out, we’re doing some exciting things.

We’ve been slammed lately, code sprinting toward alpha, but I wanted to take a break today and show you something new. So, this week a video on the client area, and some notable items.

1. All new, simple, unique, clean, and professional design built with usability in mind.
2. Staff can login as the client, and return to that client’s profile in the staff interface when done.
3. Fixed width interface, designed with customization in mind. (More on this in the future!)
4. Reminders to pay displayed prominently if any invoices are open. (You’re running a business, right? Get paid, your customer can worry about registering a new domain second. :D)
5. Helpful tooltips and notices displayed throughout.

This is a very basic overview of the core of the client area. Not shown are the ticket system, order system, or portal.. and some other things. (We’ll save those for later.)

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

If you’ve been following us for long, you know we talk a lot about invoices. Most recently we did a video about Invoice Customization, and our amazing Invoice Auto-Save feature.

From the beginning Blesta has supported paper invoices. Some clients, typically business clients, want to receive their invoices in the mail. For those clients, Blesta can queue up invoices for print. A staff member logs in, prints them out, stuffs them in envelopes, applies postage and drops them in the mail.

v3 has this ability too, but can optionally do so much more. What if your billing staff didn’t have to print out anything? What if Blesta printed, stuffed, and mailed the invoice by itself? In v3, it essentially can, through Postal Methods. Automating the tangible.

Of course invoices by email have long been widely accepted. However, some companies still prefer to receive invoices in the mail — and, if it means you get paid on time, it’s worth just mailing them the invoice. It’s about meeting them where they are. Whether email, postal mail, or fax, Blesta can send out invoices automatically or with just a couple of clicks.

Yet another reason Blesta is the professional choice.

Isn’t that invoice beautiful? It looks great, and it was sent automatically. Did I mention you can include a return envelope too?

Even though more than 95% of our own invoices are sent out via email, this is a feature I’m personally looking forward to in v3.

On another note, we’re getting close to an alpha release. It’s a private release intended for developers only. If you want to build an extension for v3 for your own use to prepare for the upcoming release, or to sell, you might qualify. Extensions include modules, gateways, plugins, and widgets. If you think you should be included in the alpha, email sales at blesta.com and let’s chat.

With a private alpha release due out soon, we’re gearing up to help developers take full advantage of the 3.0 platform. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to build really advanced plugins, widgets, gateways, and modules. To facilitate that we’ve written some detailed interfaces and libraries, as well as put together a pretty in-depth developer manual. And while the v3 source is almost entirely open, I figured what the heck, how about some source code documentation? So I created Doctorate.

Doctorate is a simple plugin for minPHP that documents source code using Reflection. Being able to read the source documentation without actually having to open the source code is a huge advantage. But because the Blesta API is just a simple access wrapper for the Models it’s a huge time saver for us. It would take months to document every API request (there are hundreds and hundreds), but Doctorate does it automatically.

Here is a sneak peak of the source code documentation from Doctorate…

Here is a sneak peak at the developer manual…

So when can you expect to get your hands on the developer manual and source documentation? If you’ve made it onto our developer list you can take advantage of these resources as soon as alpha is released. When 3.0 goes into beta we’ll make the documentation public.

We’ve talked about payments before, but this week I wanted to go a little more in depth. The way payments are handled and applied by a billing system is important, things need to be accounted for.

Some popular billing systems do really strange things, like..

1. Create a new invoice when someone attempts to pay multiple open invoices for the sum of those invoices, and when that invoice is paid mark the others as paid.
2. Allow staff to mark an invoice as paid without recording a transaction.

Simply put, this leads to an accounting nightmare. If an invoice is marked paid, surely there should be a history of how and when that invoice was paid, right? Absolutely! Blesta handles this well in v3, but that’s not a new feature!.. We’ve been accounting for everything since the beginning.

Good billing software will let you pay a single invoice with multiple payments, and pay multiple invoices with a single payment. It should keep track of how much of which payments were applied to which invoices.

In this screenshot you can see that 2 payments were made to a single invoice, and the invoice still isn’t paid in full yet. (Click image to see full size)

It all comes down to this: We want to do things right, and we spend the extra time to do it right when others don’t. It’s this way with everything we do. We engage every feature with purpose and forethought. It’s about creating great software whether we sell a thousand copies or a million copies.