The most comon question i am asked by my clients, is whats the Best/Cheapest Payment Gateway to use!!!

Well for those who are a little confused to what a payment gateway is, it works like this

• You choose the things on a website you want to buy
  
• Go through the checkout system as usual
  
• The cart transfers you to a Payment Gateway Which is usually owned by a bank (sometimes it looks like your still on the original site, but actually its an illusion, your usually being passed to the Payment Gateway still)
  
• You then need to pay for the products using a Debit/Credit card (or an account of some form linked to your bank account depending on the Payment Gateway )
  
• The Payment Gateway then takes your money, which is passed into the bank account of the website owner
  
• The Payment Gateway then sends you back to the website with a special code hidden to tell the site if the payment was accept to not
  
• If accepted the invoice is changed to say completed, if not it is changed to say failed.

Its actually very simple, what's difficult is how the Payment Gateway charges you.

One of the components we are building for our Joomla 1.5 Google Based Project, is "Google Base Vehicles".

This is a full system that allows a Joomla site to be converted into a Vehicle system. Allowing Vehicle sellers of all types to advertise their Vehicles on their own site, which will automatically upload to Google via FTP, to be shown on the worlds largest Vehicle Portal for free.

www.googlebasevehicles.com
You can see the component there as it is developed. You can also login to see the admin panel
www.googlebasevehicles.com/administrator

Username = demo
Password = demo

Please have a play with it

Today we started a whole new project
www.JoomlaGoogleBase.com

This will be the development of many component that fit into Joomla, allowing the system to be changed into almost anything you want and upload the results to Google Base.

More will be posted as i we move through this project.

Regards

Ian

I suppose you could call this round 2 - ding ding

We have returned back to the studio in London to take more images for Rodnik, but taking what we learnt in the first attempt on board and using constant lighting.

We built a huge 24 foot cylinder of poly boards 8ft high ot use as backgrounds and to increase the amount of ambiant light, as constant lighting isnt anywhere near as good as studio lights.

You can see the results here
http://www.bullettimephotography.com/temp/lily/
We only used 8 cameras here as we knew it was an experiment and would be more of a trial and error than science. But we were all very pleased with the results, but as we were about to take another set, one of the support crew fell into the cylinder and knocked it over....

http://www.bullettimephotography.com/temp/lily/enamulflying.html
Thats us messing around whilst we were waiting for Lily to get chnaged for the next shoot. See nothing but serious work

This payment gateway works with the following setup's

• Joomla 1.5.X (Legacy on) and Virtuemart 1.1.X
• Joomla 1.0.X with Virtuemart 1.0.X
• Joomla 1.0.X and Virtuemart 1.1.X

It wont work with Joomla 1.5.X unless the Legacy plugin is turned on, as it just keeps saying "direct Access to this location is not allowed." within the payment gateway configuration panel, which I'm trying to find a solution now.

A fully working Payment Gateway that I will install for you included in the price.

For £50 (which is 2hrs labour) I will add the gateway, set it up, and contact the HSBC E-Payment team, have them check it and activate the account for you.

All I need is -

• Customer ID Number
• Hash Key
• FTP or Joomla Xplorer access
• Customers address (as HSBC will ask me for this when I call them to verify they are in the correct account)
• The site MUST have a valid SSL cert, shared or dedicated to the site, (otherwise the gateway will fail every time, this is a HSBC requirement)

I don't need any other details regarding the account/client such as sort code or account number. When I am speaking to HSBC, they cant/wont give me any info for security reasons regarding your client or finances. All they can do to by law is tell me if the gateway has been accepted or declined, no other info will be passed over. Once they have accepted it, they will turn the gateway to live within 24 hrs allowing you or your client to accept payments.

Once the order has been paid successfully, the order status is updated to "completed", allowing digital downloads to be downloaded, and the webmaster to see it has been accepted. The buyer is transferred back to the site after with a Message explaining what has happened in plain English. There are about 16 messages that could be displayed, depending on what result HSBC gives.

• Transaction has been successfully processed.
• You have cancelled the transaction.
• The transaction was rejected by Fraud Shield (which is a fraud detection system by HSBC).
• The transaction was placed in Review state by Fraud Shield (which is a fraud detection system by HSBC).
• The transaction failed because of invalid input data.
• The transaction failed because the CPI was configured incorrectly.
• The transaction failed because the Storefront was configured incorrectly.
• The connection timed out.
• The transaction failed because your browser refused a cookie.
• Your browser does not support 128-bit encryption
• The CPI cannot communicate with the secure ePayment engine.
• The processor declined the transaction for an unknown reason.
• The transaction was declined because of a problem with the card. For example, an invalid card number or expiration date was specified.
• The processor did not return a response.
• The amount specified in the transaction was either too high or too low for the processor.
• The specified currency is not supported by either the processor or the card.
• The order is invalid because the order ID is a duplicate.

I have been told by the E Payment team, that this will work for any HSBC account anywhere in the world, I have set it up for one Hong Kong account, and it worked perfect.

Any queries, please ask away, but please look at my feedback on other extensions, so you can see how I work with my clients :)

Click below for download info

http://www.virtuemartfrooglefeed.com/download-area/virtuemart/hsbc-virtuemart-payment-gateway.html

We have been commissioned to produce an online interactive video with the incredible www.enamul.co.uk fashion photographer for the launch of Rodnik Clothing (winner of London Fashion Show 2008).

Whilst Enamel produced an incredible video of the launch, i was commissioned to take Object VR photography of the New York Elite model Shaina Danziger, which you can see the results of here

http://www.bullettimephotography.com/temp/shaina/

We found as this was an experiment in its own right, that the lighting was incorrect, as the shutter speed was faster than the lighting. So some of the cameras were triggering after or before the lights were triggering, making dark images.

So the next time we will be using constant lighting to over come this problem.

I will update here when the video and virtual tours are finished :)

• “Is there any way to stop spam”
• “Can we stop emails from the fake banks”

• “my bank keeps sending me emails but it’s a dead link”

Over the past few months we have been researching and building a Bullet Time Photography rig, which allows photography similar to that of "The Matrix Movie". This was mainly produced for the fashion industry, but we have been testing it with many other industries to try and what affects we can acheive

The Rig consists of 100 Digital SLR cameras, which are all fired at the precise same time, which gives an accuracy of about one billionth of a second.

You can see a video of us setting this up in a clients venue a few days ago below
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY60EtLmCTQ

The long awaited Joomla Froogle Feed V4 was released today, allowing much more control over the Version 3.

New Features include

- Auto FTP upload to Google

- With or Without Tax

- Condition New or Used

- Custom Categories

- Period of time between FTP uploads

The Froogle Feed is a system that allows you to upload all products for free from your Virtuemart Shopping store onto Google Base, the worlds largest Price comparison site.