I maintain a website for a non-profit who hosts an event every year where people buy tickets to it and pay through paypal. I have the website payment set up so that it collects the necessary data along the way and we need to generate PDF tickets that are emailed to the buyer automatically. The tickets are cheap ($10) and we sell 600-750 of them (hopefully) so some of the places that will handle all aspects of selling are out of the price range for what we have in mind, but we don't have the volunteers to do all of the data collection and mailing manually.

Is there a fairly simple way to take the payment details and fill in a PDF form which is then emailed to the buyer? From what I've seen looking through paypal dev sites and various tutorials I can get certain parts of the process done fairly easily but piecing them all together doesn't seem to work. The process I'm thinking, which may be wrong, needs to go from paypal purchase details > mysql database > cron job to run php script? > generate and email tickets.

There are 4 different tickets, but two are secondary based on what's purchased first. Basically if you buy 5 gold level tickets, 1 is labelled for you and the other 4 are just labelled "guests of .....", and all tickets need to be automatically numbered sequentially. This may be over-complicating things but it makes things easier for some other purposes we have like door prizes and such. I'm having a meeting on Wednesday to see if I can simplify things a bit but if someone here has some ideas then I'd greatly appreciate it.

8/22/2010 10:04:49 PM

that sounds reasonable. what parts of the piecing together don't seem to work?

8/22/2010 10:24:29 PM

the answer is coldfusion

pony up

8/22/2010 10:32:28 PM

my php skills


I can get by w/ some database stuff, but it's slow going. The PDF and email stuff is all foreign though.

8/22/2010 10:33:04 PM

php has built in email functions http://php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php but you gotta make sure your server is configured correctly for it to work

generating pdf will be trickier, but i'm sure there's some libraries out there

8/22/2010 10:45:13 PM

Why not just use Eventbrite (http://www.eventbrite.com) and solve all the issues you described at once? Allows for event registration, emailing, pdf ticket copies, paypal integration, etc etc. You can even let users tweet the event they registered for on the final confirmation page for publicity.

8/22/2010 10:49:54 PM

Using a service like eventbrite (I looked at them earlier) meant that they would lose over 15%. Even going with their NPO pricing they're out at least 12%. If I can get them a one-time fee and have it all be managed in-house that would be more to their liking.

And I'll find out on Wednesday if their site's server has the necessary functions enabled and installed or if I'm going to have to run it on one of mine. :/

[Edited on August 22, 2010 at 11:26 PM. Reason : fd]

8/22/2010 10:57:27 PM

You'll need the pdf_php.dll library and here's a couple tutorials to get you started (this should be a cake walk once you get your library setup. Just print their name and ticket number with a verification code.)

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/generate-pdfs-php

http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/PHP/Use-PHP-to-Create-Dynamic-pdf-Files/1/



[Edited on August 23, 2010 at 1:24 AM. Reason : ;]

8/23/2010 1:13:04 AM

Quote :

"You'll need the pdf_php.dll library"

if that's a real web server it'll be pdf_php.so

8/23/2010 3:54:58 AM

why not try Etix?

8/23/2010 7:28:54 AM

^^ yea, that. It was early, I was sleepy

8/23/2010 12:11:38 PM

Quote :

"if that's a real web server it'll be pdf_php.so"

i was going to say the same thing

i did this once for a consulting gig... the tickets even had 2D barcodes and i wrote a .NET CF app that read them/verified them/whatnot. i also have a lot of experience with the paypal IPN stuff. lemme know if you need any help - i'd offer suggestions but i don't know how much you've already done.

8/23/2010 6:09:37 PM

All I've done is research so whatever help you can provide would be great. The company that maintains the servers and does major site changes/design for the NPO is asking that I provide whatever I can to them because they haven't done any paypal integration before and would be starting from scratch and billing for the development + implementation instead of just taking an existing setup out of their toolkit and changing a few lines to suit our needs.

8/23/2010 10:40:59 PM