I've found a lot of success in failure this week. I've spent the better part of 3 days struggling to get PayPal integrated to a site I'm working on and still haven't managed to get it set up properly. Digging through PayPal's endless and poorly organized API docs, researching how to handle the params I'm receiving from PayPal, understanding that redirect_to is a HTTP GET request while I need a POST, and reading production log files to troubleshoot hasn't solve my problem. I'm still forced to disable auto-return (forcing the user to click on a link after payment to get back to my site) in order to finish the transaction. Frustrating but not a completely lost battle.
API, params, GET, POST, production logs. What?!!? Exactly. There was a moment yesterday while knee deep in my investigation where I took a quick step back and realized how far I've come in the past ten weeks. I've picked up a whole new skill set (and the vocabulary to go with it!) and am writing code to handle a custom PayPal integration to accept credit card payments on a site built from scratch. Awesome!
I'm close to solving this PayPal riddle and after talking to a lot of folks this week about what I was working on, the general consensus was that PayPal is terrible and that its API and documentation is some of the most confusing out there. I'm hoping they're right because if I get this hooked up, everything else I tackle should be easier.
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