PayPal Donation Form

[JHund]

I installed the form tools donation form (http://docs.formtools.org/tutorials/paypal/ ) on my website and had a quick question...

It appears that this form is setup for "payments" instead of "donations". Is this okay (legally, for example)?

I want to accept donations, not payments, so how would I modify the form to go to paypal's donation process instead of payment process?

P.S. It would not let me register on the forums initially because the username I was trying to register with resulted in "Your details match those of a spammer, registration disallowed." -.-

[Ben]

Hi JHund,

Welcome to the forums!

It appears that this form is setup for "payments" instead of "donations". Is this okay (legally, for example)?

Is there a difference? I don't believe there is... legally, no doubt, but functionally it's all the same thing: a payment is being put through, regardless of whether it's displayed as a donation or payment.

And sorry about the incorrect spam detection! We're fighting an ongoing battle here against spammers, so we've had to implement a number of different levels of spam detection in the forum software. One of them apparently doesn't like you.

- Ben

[JHund]

Hi JHund,

Welcome to the forums!

It appears that this form is setup for "payments" instead of "donations". Is this okay (legally, for example)?

Is there a difference? I don't believe there is... legally, no doubt, but functionally it's all the same thing: a payment is being put through, regardless of whether it's displayed as a donation or payment.

And sorry about the incorrect spam detection! We're fighting an ongoing battle here against spammers, so we've had to implement a number of different levels of spam detection in the forum software. One of them apparently doesn't like you.

- Ben

Thanks for the reply. So do you think it's okay if I use it for donation purposes?

[Ben]

Absolutely!

- Ben

[sogreen]

Is there a way to only go to the paypal payment if the amount is greater than 0? Otherwise they are directed to the success page.

We have a form for popcorn day but payment is optional. Parents have two options:
1. I give permission for my child to receive popcorn for the year and I will donate $7.
2. I give permission for my child to receive popcorn for the year but I choose not to donate.

However, if a parents chooses not to donate then they are still redirected to the paypal page and cannot put through an order of $0.00. How would I get around that? Any ideas?

[Ben]

Hi sogreen,

Good question...

For this, you'd really need to doctor the PHP a bit. After the form has been submitted, run some arbitrary code to figure out where it should go next. This code could be placed at the top of the page you're linking to right now. It would check the value of the payment field (e.g. a field with the name attribute of "payment"), then redirect elsewhere if it's set to zero. For example:

PHP Code:

if ($_POST["payment"] == 0) {
  header("location: yourotherpage.php";
  exit;
} 


But precisely how it should be coded & where it should go, depends on your setup and existing code. Still, hope this gives you a few ideas!

- Ben