Support

September 26, 2013 at 9:39 pm

Hi Susan,

I checked the transactions page you linked to and it’s not parsing the [ESPRESSO_TXN_PAGE] shortcode. This is likely causing the payment status to not update.

The first thing to verify is that the /transactions/ page is set to be the Notify URL in Event Espresso>General Settings under page settings.

When the transaction page shortcode parses correctly it will display a “No ID was supplied” message when you navigate to the page in a web browser. Here is an example:

https://eventespresso.com/testdrive/transactions/

September 27, 2013 at 12:54 pm

Hi Susan,

The return url of

https://pcea1.org/?page_id=176&r_id=17-5245d1d00a1af&type=paypal

is incorrect. It should be:

http://pcea1.org/?page_id=176&r_id=17-5245d1d00a1af&type=paypal

It appears that there’s something setting the return URL to be https instead of http. Is there a box checked where it says something like “Force SSL on return from payment’? If this is checked you can try unchecking it and saving the payment options.

September 27, 2013 at 2:54 pm

Hi Susan,

I agree, we are getting close.

So the next thing I would do is try speeding up the transactions page because there is about a 2 second delay when it tries to load up content from twitter.com in the sidebar. This may be delaying the Instant Payment Notification response on the transactions page.

This can be done in a few ways:

Remove all widgets from the transactions page by using a plugin like widget logic:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-logic/

or you can install our simplified page template onto your WP theme. You can download it from this page:

https://eventespresso.com/wiki/how-to-set-up-paypal-ipn/

How it works is you upload the txnpage.php file to your current theme’s folder, then set the transactions page to use the txnpage template in the WP page editor’s page attributes box.

October 7, 2013 at 9:34 am

Hi Susan,

Apologies if you’ve already checked this before and did not find any errors, but can you check the paypal log file that’s in the /wp-content/uploads/espresso/logs directory?

It should have a log of each transaction and if there are any errors along with those please lets us know what the errors are.

This will help narrow down any issues with the communication between your site and PayPal. It sounds like it works sometimes, and does not work othertimes. So it could be timing out.

October 9, 2013 at 10:20 am

Even deactivating WP Super Cache may not keep it from serving up previously cached pages. The way it works is it generates static html files and modifies the .htaccess file to serve up the static html file if it exists before trying to generate it with php. You may need to delete the cached files before it stops serving them up. They should be in wp-content/cache.

October 10, 2013 at 11:22 pm

Hey Susan, did some testing and digging on your site, and I think I tracked down the problem. I changed a couple lines in gateways/paypal/paypal_vars.php so that when the IPN message comes back from paypal, it doesn’t get redirected by the pretty permalinks. Specifically, these 3 lines:

$myPaypal->addField('return', add_query_arg( array('r_id'=>$registration_id, 'type'=>'paypal'), get_permalink($org_options['return_url'])));
	$myPaypal->addField('cancel_return', get_permalink($org_options['cancel_url']));
	$myPaypal->addField('notify_url', add_query_arg( array('r_id'=>$registration_id, 'type'=>'paypal', 'id'=>$attendee_id, 'event_id'=>$event_id, 'attendee_action'=>'post_payment', 'form_action'=>'payment'), get_permalink($org_options['notify_url'])));

I switched the site into paypal’s sandbox mode, ran a test transaction, and switched it back. The test came back with the attendee marked completed. Feel free to run some tests of your own, and let us know if that clears the problem up.

October 11, 2013 at 8:58 am

Sorry, I turned it off in the payment settings, but I had it still on in the individual event. It’s off now.

October 11, 2013 at 1:37 pm

Did you guys turn on Payment Data Transfer? (https://developer.paypal.com/webapps/developer/docs/classic/paypal-payments-standard/integration-guide/paymentdatatransfer/) I was doing some testing and the data getting sent back to the thank-you page along with the customer changed. We’ve found that the customer is getting sent back to the thank-you page about 40 seconds before the IPN message hits the transactions page. I was trying to bullet-proof it to handle that situation when the data getting sent to the thank-you page changed, and it looks like the new data is PDT data. Let me know if you can turn that off, we should be able to wrap this up for you. Thanks.

October 11, 2013 at 3:31 pm

Ok, as long as you’ve turned it off, I can proceed to bullet proof our code against the delay of the IPN message to the transactions page. I’ll let you know when I’m done. Thanks.

October 11, 2013 at 4:06 pm

That’s strange, I’m not getting that. It might be a browser warning because you are going from an https site to an http site with POST data. The only way to get rid of it would be to put an ssl cert on your site. You can get a free one from http://cert.startcom.org/. It’s a little bit of a geeky process, you have to put a browser cert on your computer to authorise your login to their site from your computer, but it’s safe.
We’ve bullet-proofed it as much as we can. If the IPN message is delayed, and the customer gets to the thank-you page first, they will get a status of “Pending” instead of “Incomplete”.