Tips on making authorizenet work in Joomla/VirtueMart

From Virtuemart Forum by Rowby Goren

The documentation on activating authorizenet is horribly sparse, but authorizenet does indeed work. I made it work just now.

The good news is IT’s EASY!

Here are step by step instructions on how to do it.  (Others are invited to jump in with their comments.)

1)  Make sure your hosting company has  PHP 4.0.2 or later, with cURL extension (with OpenSSL support). If you are not sure, contact your hosting company.  This is essential.

2)  In the VirtueMart control panel, click on List Payment Methods.  Make sure Credit Card is active.

3) Click on Credit Card.  Make sure the cards (Visa, Mastercard, whatever) you have set up with your authorizenet.com account are checkmarked, and the other cards are not checkmarked.

4) Click on Configuration tab.  Type in your authorizenet.com Login ID.  Keep it in Test mode for now. Click “Show/Change the Transaction Key” button.

5) Where it says “Please type in your User Password:” enter your JOOMLA user password that you have previously set up on your site. (NOT the authorizent.com password.)

6)  A box will appear where you enter the Authorizenet’s current transaction key.  In the bottom box re-enter your Joomla user password.  Save the panel.   (***)

7)  Make sure Authorizenet is in TEST mode  by logging into your authorizenet account at authorizenet.com)

8   Go to your store and do  a TEST order.  Use the following TEST credit card to do your authorizenet test. Note: The below card only works in TEST mode and will return an error in live mode.)

5424000000000015 MasterCard.   Use any fake name and use any date after today’s date as the card expiration date.

9) Once the above works, go to authorizenet.com and change your account from TEST to LIVE.  And go into the Virtuemart Credit Card configuration tab and change authorizenet from TEST to LIVE.

10) Then do a test charge with a real card.  You can go back to authorizenet.com and VOID that card charge if you do it before the settlement process takes place.

*** NOTE: You get your transaction key by logging into your authorizenet.com account and creating one under Authorizenet’s Settings and Profile link> Obtain Transaction Key link.

ANOTHER NOTE: Interestingly, the above worked WITHOUT the test site using a secure certificate.  However I strongly suggest you set up a secure certificate for your site.

That’s it!

Rocky Rasonable

A filipino Senior PHP Programmer, Web Developer and Webmaster based in Davao, Philippines. Expert in Joomla, WordPress, Soholaunch, Oscommerce, Drupal, Social Media Sites, and etc.

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Tips on making authorizenet work in Joomla/VirtueMart

1.) CCCA by IDX Web Designs

Content management system based on PHP and MySQL. Powerful yet simple CMS for all. Comprehensive functionality. Pricing seems to be reasonable for the small company. Easy to install and user friendly.  Available only for All IDX Web Designs Clients. Contact IDX Web Designs and Request a quote

2.) Joomla by Wilco Jansen

An award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

3.) WordPress by Ryan Boren

State-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

4.) Soholaunch

An easy-to-use website creation tool to help you build, maintain, and manage your personal or business website. It runs right from your website, making it easy to take shopping cart orders online, create forms, and edit site pages from any computer in the world!

5.) Drupal

A free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites

Rocky Rasonable

A filipino Senior PHP Programmer, Web Developer and Webmaster based in Davao, Philippines. Expert in Joomla, WordPress, Soholaunch, Oscommerce, Drupal, Social Media Sites, and etc.

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Tips on making authorizenet work in Joomla/VirtueMart

The first thing we need to do is connect to the database.

mysql_connect("somehost", "username", "password") or die ("Can't connect!");

This will try to connect to the database on somehost and login with “username” as the username and “password” as the password. If it can’t, it will output an error message saying that it can’t connect. For your own code be sure to change somehost to your host (most of the times it’s localhost, ask your admin), username to your username (duh), and password to your password. Another way to connect to a database is to open a persistent connection. To do this, use the mysql_pconnectfunction and pass it the same arguments as mysql_connect. Why open a persistent connection? When you call mysql_pconnect, instead of going out and opening a connection to the database, it sees if one is already open, if it is, the script will use it. Also, when the script has finished executing, the connection to the database will not automatically be closed like it is when using mysql_connect. This way the connection can be used later on. Using a persistent connection is a good idea if your scripts constantly need to connect to the database.

After we have opened a connection to the database, we then select a database.

mysql_select_db("database_name") or die("Can't select database!");

This will try to select the database named “database_name” (for your own code change it to the name of your database). If it can’t select the database, it will output and error. Once you’re actually connected to a database, you will want to query a table in the database to get whatever you want done. A query looks like this:

mysql_query("Some query");

Common queries are SELECTand INSERT For full documentation go to the mysql web site (http://www.mysql.com). Another common php function is mysql_num_rows; if it isn’t obvious this gets the number of rows from a query. Here is an example of how it can be used with mysql_query:

<?php

  $result= mysql_query("SELECT * FROM some_table");

  $number_of_rows= @mysql_num_rows($result);

  if ($number_of_rows == 0)

  {

    echo "Sorry there are no rows";

  }

  else {

    echo "Yes! we found some rows!";

  }

?>

Now you may be wondering why I put the @ sign before mysql_num_rows. In php, the @ sign suppress errors; I put it in front of mysql_num_rows so that if there are no rows, MySQL will not output a bunch of errors. So when would mysql_num_rows be useful? Well, you could use it for an authentication script which searchs the database for a username and password and if it doesn’t find any (i.e. if no rows are returned), it tells the user that the username, or password, are not correct.

Another really useful function is mysql_fetch_array, because it gets the rows and puts them in an array that contains the name of the rows. That way instead of having to access each row by number you can do it by name! For example, let’s say that our database looked like this:

We would use the following code to get the users’ names and output them:

<?php

  echo "The users in this database are: <br>";

  $result= mysql_query("SELECT * FROM some_table");

  while ($row= mysql_fetch_array($result))

  {

    $username= $row["User"];

    echo "$username<br>";

  }

?>

This will output all the usernames in a database; you can add error checking if you like. The while statement is read “while there are rows that satisfy the query, put the contents of the row from the column ‘User’ into the variable ‘username,’ and print the usernames (each on a new line) to an HTML page.”

Now let’s cover a couple of functions that actually work with the database. The first is mysql_create_db, don’t you just love how the functions are named you can figure out what they do just by looking at the function name, this one obviously creates a database. Here’s how to use it:

<?php

  echo "I am going to try to create a database...<br>";

  if (mysql_create_db("test_database"))

  {

    echo "Hooray, I've created the database!<br>";

  }

  else {

    echo "Darn couldn't create the database! because: ";

    echo "mysql_error() <br>";

  }

?>

You can see I used a new function, mysql_error, you don’t really need to know too much about it, all it does is return the error string sent by MySQL. Now since we learned how to create a database, how’s about we learn to delete one. To do that use the mysql_drop_db, here is how to use it:

<?php

  echo "I am going to try to delete a database...<br>";

  $result= mysql_drop_db("test_database");

  if (!$result)

  {

    echo "Darn couldn't I couldn't delete the database!<br>";

  }

  else {

    echo "Hooray, I've deleted the database<br>";

  }

?>

You can see that the syntax is very similar to that of mysql_create_db, just pop the name of the database you want to delete into the function.

The next two items aren’t functions, rather they are queries that you can use to manage an existing table. The following query will insert data into a database:

<?php

  echo "I am going to try to insert data into a table...<br>";

  $result= mysql_query("INSERT INTO test_database (username, password) VALUES

	               (Rahim, adfjaldadfsdaf)");

  if (!$result)

  {

    echo "Darn couldn't I couldn't delete the database!<br>";

  }

  else {

    echo "Hooray, I've deleted the database<br>";

  }

?>

This query should be pretty obvious, it inserts the data defined in between the parentheses into the rows. Just a little note to remember, the order in which you write out the column names is the order your data will be entered (i.e. a row with the contents Rahim will be entered under username, not password since we wrote username then pasword, if it was reveresd Rahim would be put under password).

The next query we’ve already gone over, I’m just going to add to it; after I’m done you should be able to use it to help create a simple search engine (upcomming tutorial)! For the sake of brevity I’ll remove all the extra php stuff and just show you the “meat” of the code.

$result= mysql_query("SELECT name FROM some_table WHERE name=Joe AND

         lastname=Sixpack OR lastname=Becker ORDER BY lastname LIMIT 20");

Now I know that looks like a long query, but it’s not really all that bad. What it’s pretty much saying is: “Get me the name from some_table where the name is Joe and the lastname is Sixpack or Becker, oh and by the way while your at it, put it in alphabetical order by the lastname; oh and one last thing, just get the first 20 results please.” MySQL has lots of other filters that you can add on to the SELECT statement, I highly suggest you download the MySQL documentation and give it a perusing.

Rocky Rasonable

A filipino Senior PHP Programmer, Web Developer and Webmaster based in Davao, Philippines. Expert in Joomla, WordPress, Soholaunch, Oscommerce, Drupal, Social Media Sites, and etc.

More Posts - Website