Payments Plus Adds Additional Listing Type Capability & Billing
While there are now several components available that can add the ability to charge for Mosets Tree listings, such as Account Expiration Control (AEC), PayToUpgrade, Opensource Joomla! Membership Control , and Payments Plus, only Payments Plus gives the site owner the ability to add additional listing types to the default Mosets Tree listing structure.
Payments Plus, is a Joomla! component from Steve Cox of Tradewise Promtions, a systems development company located at Hervey Bay in Queensland, Australia. The primary difference that separates Payments Plus from most of the other billing systems currently available for Mosets Tree is that Payments Plus places the restrictions on the listings owned by the user, instead of on the user as is the case with most of the other systems mentioned above. Allowing the management of listing types as well as payments is the strong point of Payments Plus.
Payments Plus is not a simple plug 'n play component, however. Installing it and configuring it in your Joomla! site involves a significant amount of hacking of the Mosets Tree template files. And tweaking the visual display of the data within Mosets Tree will require you to edit template code, CSS, as well as the com_mtree language files.
Getting Started: Downloading the Files
Important Notes — This tutorial assumes you are working with a site running on the most recent stable version of Joomla! version 1.5.22, and that you already have a functioning Mosets Tree directory. Do not work in your live site for this setup procedure. Backup your site files and MySQL database and get your site working in a non-public testing area before proceding. If you have made template modifications to your Mosets Tree templates, you will need to re-modify them again after installing Payments Plus.
Installing Payments Plus for Mosets Tree
- Download the most recent version of Payments Plus from their site.
- Unzip the Payments Plus installation archive and then install the Payments Plus component in the administrator area using the Joomla! extensions installer. The component installer package is the zipped file whose title is something like: "com_paymentsplus_NEW_INSTALL_2.25.zip" You'll need to have Joomla! Super Admin access to do so. As you can see, this tutorial is installing the 2.25 version of Payments Plus.
- Backup the default Mosets Tree template files from the /components/com_mtree/templates/m2 directory.
- Unzip the correct patch kit archive for your version of Mosets Tree. If your specific version isn't available, use the latest version in the archive, i.e., I used the 2.18 version for my Mosets Tree 2.1.9 install.
- Take a look at the files inside the patch kit. You may want to back up the same files from your test site before proceding because we'll be overwriting them in the next step.
- Copy the files in the patch kit to their respective directories on the server, overwriting any existing files with the newer, Payments Plus enabled versons.
More to come...
