Allow users to pay for a posting

I'm building a site where we want our users to be able to pay for a posting. So for instance, if they want to post a job opening in our job board, they would fill out a custom form for jobs and submit. Upon submitting it will take them to a page to proof their entry and then pay for it via PayPal.

I want the post to remain unpublished until PayPal returns a confirmation that the post has been paid for.

Has anybody done something like this with Gravity Forms?

Here's what my plan is for the workflow, please let me know if you see any problems...

On the proof your post page, I will create a random transaction number hash, SHA1 it and insert it into the record. I'll submit the transaction number as a custom field to PayPal in the return URL. Once the user pays for their post, the return URL will grab the record from the post where the SHA1(transaction number) == the hash stored in the db and then set it's publish state to publish.

does that make sense? Is there an easier way?

thanks in advance.

I've been waiting for this for like uhh, 9 months.... and that other wordpress product you mentioned Carl reminds me of an almost identical conversation we had a few months ago lol... I've got a site built, domain and all it needs is paypal or google checkout integration with GF and I could go live with it :) so any rough estimates or ideas at all would be awesome.

ok, i guess its time to go out and get it made myself :) will post a for sale thread here when its done ;-)

I have a dev team lined up to do it, just waiting for a time estimate from them to determine the $$ that will be involved... if anyone would like to team up on this I would most certainly entertain a JV on this, I play on getting the initial dev done and providing long term support as well. if you are interested shoot me a message on the contact form on my site at admindaily.com and we can get the ball rolling...

I got it 6 times lol... thats something new since i upgraded to WP 3.0 RC2

guess i need to submit a ticket :-)

i'll reply to ya in the am with some info.

Jesse, I'm also interested and disappointed some sort of Paypal add-on hasn't been released, despite much talk about it.

That said, I'm wondering if GF will be suitable in this context as I can't see how users would be able to update/amend their 'posts'.

I'm really looking for similar functionality to this WP theme:

http://templatic.com/cms-themes/real-estate-wordpress-theme-templatic

I would buy the above theme, but despite some impressive work and the payment system, there's too much 'fluff' I don't need for my site, and besides it makes entensive use of custom fields but I feel custom taxonomies are more appropriate as it allows for cross-referencing and filtering of search results.

Maybe I should buy the above theme and hack the bits I need ;-)

Thanks Carl, much appreciated. I'm intrigued by the prospect of your new WP project.

By the way everyone, I just ran a test on the real estate theme (see link in my previous comment above). It has some nice touches and bells and whistles but the IA is dreadful, no use of categories for geographical values, no tagging or custom taxonomies and if you abandon the Paypal screen you get dumped back to the site saying your order was successful!

As a quick update from my end, We have decided to hold off on doing this as a plugin due to the missing functionality that GF needs to make it a drop in solution. As Carl has said, there are functions and hooks that need to be in GF before doing this plugin is practical, I need it asap like a lot of others in here but don't want to put the effort and $$$ into an addon that will more than likely break once GF is updated to handle the same.

SO, for anyone interested IN suggest we keep reminding them how much we could use this :)

I too am on the edge waiting for this plug in, I actually bought GF with the understanding that it was a function and now I am reading that its not out yet. Bummer for me.
Please hurry, :o)

I'd like to second the request for Authorize.net integration.

+1

+1 I would pay for this dev

Authorize.net integration is at the top of my wish list!