Non Subscription Payments

The normal method of using PHP-SecureArea is to use PayPal subscriptions which is a recurring payment. However, you can also create a button which is a normal PayPal 'Buy Now' button and not a recurring subscription button. You could use this when you want to create a one-off access to the secure area, for example you may want customers to access the secure area but do not need it to expire.

In fact, you can still expire access to the secure area, but you must have the CRON job running for that to happen.

You may also want to use this method when you do not want people to sign up for a PayPal subscription. To use a PayPal subscription you have to have a PayPal account. To use a PayPal 'Buy Now' button you can pay by credit card without a PayPal account.

The button code is available in the admin area of PHP-SecureArea just like the other subscription buttons which you can copy and paste into your pages. An example is as follows :

<form action="http://www.yourservername/phpsecurearea/ipn/process.php" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_cart">
<input type="hidden" name="recid" value="1">
<input type="image" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but23.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!">
</form>

Normally, users are created automatically through PayPal. However, we can create users manually from the admin area, selecting which subscription area the user should subscribe to.

For manual users the subscription due date is normally blank because there is no concept of subscription for a manual user.

In the subscription definition you can define the subscription to be recurring or non-recuring.

If you define it as non-recuring, you can use the CRON job to deactivate the user at the end of the period. If you define it as recuring, then the CRON job will not deactivate the user because it is non-recuring and it will continue forever.

In the listing of the user, the date expire for a recuring subscription will be 0000-00-00. For a non-recuring subscription the date expire will be filled in.

Recuring subscription
Date Created: Yes
Sub Due Date: No
Date Expire: No

Non-recurring subscription
Date Created: No
Sub Due Date: No
Date Expire: Yes

If you create a product with value of 0.00, and use a subscription button with registration, the sign up screen will include an email address entry.

This allows a free sign up process.

The username / password is displayed to the customer after sign up is complete.

If the customer signs up again with the same email address, the application looks up the password that was originally created and uses that again.