Bringing you PayPal Access for Joomla!
Saturday, 29 October 2011
During the Innovate 2011 conference of October 12th/13th, various amazing things were presented to the public: The release of X.commerce Fabric which will be a new way to connect Magento developers with PayPal, Facebook, eBay and much much more. A new MagentoConnect site. More hints on Magento 2. But also the release of PayPal Access - an authentication mechanism for use in Magento, but also other webapplications. We are proud to bring you a Joomla! implementation of PayPal Access - free for everybody to use.
What's in the package?
Our PayPal Access for Joomla! package actually contains three packages: A module, a component and a plugin. The module is used to display a PayPal logo somewhere on your pages (assigned to a module-position). Once clicked upon this image, a popup will open up which will redirect the visitor to the PayPal login-screen. After logging in with PayPal Access, you are redirected back to the Joomla! site. The popup closes, and the PayPal Access authentication has been completed.
If the Authentication Plugin is enabled at this point, you will be automatically logged into the Joomla! site. If no account exists yet, a new account will automatically be created. Under the hood, the component is used for all that. The component is actually never shown to the user (neither in the frontend nor in the backend) but contains valuable things like OpenID exchanges and security checks.
As an extra thing, the PayPal Access authentication pulls extra PayPal userdata like billing settings and address-information into Joomla!. Our extension makes all this information available in a session-array, which can be used by other extensions to build login upon.
Future releases of PayPal Access for Joomla!
First of all, our future releases of this extension will still be free and are actually awaiting your input for new features. Please post on our Yireo Forum for more suggestions on which features to include. We ourselves are thinking of parameters in the Joomla! backend to finetune how the extension should behave - for instance, include an option to determine whether new users should be automatically created or not.
But another - far more important - thing we will work on, is the actual reason why PayPal Access was invented in the first place. It's not just an authentication tool, it also carries with it personal information of the PayPal user (shipping details, etcetera). The purpose of our extension will be to autocomplete forms within MageBridge, VirtueMart, JomSocial, CB, Tienda, etcetera so that the PayPal data will be automatically inserted where indeeded. Most likely we will create Joomla! plugins to offer easy extension.
Stay tuned.