A Few Newbie Questions Regarding Gateways, Templates And Modules

[LeonardChallis]

Hi everyone, I've been working on some stuff for Blesta for our new company recently and I seem to be going round in circles, so thought I'd post here. I don't seem to be able to find the answers on the forum here or in the documentation, but if that's more down to my inexperience with developing for Blesta and there are decent links, please do send me away to read. There's nothing worse than someone asking for all the answers without wanting to try first!

 

So what I'm doing I didn't expect to be anything too outrageous or new. Firstly, I need to make a payment gateway. The main problem I'm having here is that I want to have a custom payment form (i.e. I don't want to show the normal credit card inputs but do some custom javascript on the page with some gui elements first). I don't seem to be able to find any examples of creating my own templates (views?) to override what's there, or hook in to it somehow. Note that I want this to be something I can properly package up, to distribute over various installs, without overwriting core files and invalidating updates.

 

My next question is in regards to selling domains. I saw a couple of really helpful posts by Licensecart (setting up products without modules, selling domains, etc) but in my case I am wondering if it's possible for me to do this in such a way that products be created (or at least updated) in a custom manner. We use a domain reselling API and we want to base prices off of that, as well as that vast number of domains available (and things like checking if they're available, and so on) - so would this be a) possible and best done with a custom module?

 

Finally, a more general question. We have the cPanel module installed and this seems to be hooked up nicely. We will also offer other products and I don't see too many more problems apart from the domain one mentioned just above, in terms of integrating with Blesta. But, it seems like a lot of work to style Blesta or use it as our main site, so I presume the best thing to do would be to have most the content and product selections from our own site which then passes over to the blesta billing site? I suppose it's a trade off, but is there any accepted ways of doing this? Can I add things to the cart easily from our static site, and optionally allow customers to go back to the main site from Blesta if they want to add more, really leaving Blesta as the payment gateway (and client area) more than a full on shop?

 

Sorry for my rambling, I hope I made sense.

 

Regards,

Leonard

[serge]

I will be answering your very last point regarding content/design integration.

 

Blesta itself is a CMS, but you can use other CMS to integrate with,

- if you like joomla, there is a full module integration (paid) it's integrate: design/user/content.

- there is also something with WP but with less integration than Joomla

- or you just integrate design with any CMS

 

Or if you have very few products like me, I just chosen to stay fully in Blesta, so any Company I setup in Blesta do have his own template (a customised copy of the bootstrap).

 

the bootstrap folder is here, you can do a copy & rename it to a custom name :   /app/views/client/bootstrap

 

and the most important files are:

- structure.pdt

- css***

 

and from the blesta admin interface there is the cms/portal plugin, where you can edit the portal page.

 

And if you do a search in Blesta forum about CMS, there is 2 way to add more pages in Blesta (code hack more powerfull for now in my opinion) or use the "admin module" for that.

 

I think, Integrate with other CMS is nice if you really need to manage catalogue, having a lot of pages, etc. if not why add an other layer?

 

Here an example of site (my own) fully using blesta: 

 

SiteShop(dot)ph

[Tyson]

So what I'm doing I didn't expect to be anything too outrageous or new. Firstly, I need to make a payment gateway. The main problem I'm having here is that I want to have a custom payment form (i.e. I don't want to show the normal credit card inputs but do some custom javascript on the page with some gui elements first). I don't seem to be able to find any examples of creating my own templates (views?) to override what's there, or hook in to it somehow. Note that I want this to be something I can properly package up, to distribute over various installs, without overwriting core files and invalidating updates.

 

While you can create your own payment gateway and integrate it into Blesta, it sounds like you want to take it a step further by changing the way that payment methods/gateways are displayed. A client can pay through the client interface, or on the last step of an order, so it may be necessary to update those two separate places to add in custom changes.

 

You could create a set of templates for your own view (not the default view), and make any custom changes (html, javascript, etc.) in them without affecting core files. If your changes are simple, it might be possible to employ vQmod instead, which will add in your custom changes without affecting core files, but it is rather limited.

 

It's often difficult to make custom changes without affecting core files, so I suppose it depends on how custom you'd like to make these updates. The problem with any custom changes--whether they directly affect core files or not--is that they likely depend on data or structures in Blesta that may change in future updates of the software. So maintenance between versions would still be necessary.

 

 

My next question is in regards to selling domains. I saw a couple of really helpful posts by Licensecart (setting up products without modules, selling domains, etc) but in my case I am wondering if it's possible for me to do this in such a way that products be created (or at least updated) in a custom manner. We use a domain reselling API and we want to base prices off of that, as well as that vast number of domains available (and things like checking if they're available, and so on) - so would this be a) possible and best done with a custom module?

 

I may need more specifics, but it sounds like you could write a plugin in Blesta to accomplish this, by creating a cron task that auto-fetches pricing information over the reseller API, and updates specific packages in Blesta to set that pricing.

 

 

Finally, a more general question. We have the cPanel module installed and this seems to be hooked up nicely. We will also offer other products and I don't see too many more problems apart from the domain one mentioned just above, in terms of integrating with Blesta. But, it seems like a lot of work to style Blesta or use it as our main site, so I presume the best thing to do would be to have most the content and product selections from our own site which then passes over to the blesta billing site? I suppose it's a trade off, but is there any accepted ways of doing this? Can I add things to the cart easily from our static site, and optionally allow customers to go back to the main site from Blesta if they want to add more, really leaving Blesta as the payment gateway (and client area) more than a full on shop?

 

The cart in Blesta is apart of the Order plugin. It should be possible (although I've never tried) to mimic the Order plugin cart functionality outside of Blesta via the API so long as the session is maintained.

[LeonardChallis]

Sorry for the slow response guys, been away for my birthday. Thanks a lot for the replies, this has given me a really good start to continue reading and learning. I'm tempted to try stay as much with Blesta as possible and just make it look and work how I want.

 

Thanks again,

Leonard