No payment gateways while developing

#1

Hi all,
I’m currently developing a s2member site.
The thing that bothers me the most at this time, is the fact that you actually have to add/configure a payment gateway.
I tried the PayPal Sandbox testing way, but this just doesn’t work (as stated in the comments it IS buggy!).
Switching to a real PayPal account is nice (and changing all payments to $0,01), but then you get the problem of email addresses already being used when trying to add a new user (the solution is to delete an existing user with the same email address, to be able to add a new user using the same email address to get through the PayPal payment gateway). To be more specific, if a new user uses the same email address an already registered user uses, the registration fails. But this email address is necessary for PayPal to register payments, but you never get to the PayPal gateway when the email address is already used… (unless you set up a lot of PayPal accounts for testing purposes only)
It would be nice if s2Member would provide a way to test new user registrations without any payment gateway.
I hate to say this, but ‘PaidMemberShip Pro’ gives you this option while developing a membership site (don’t get me wrong … I definitavely prefer s2Member above PMS Pro for custom coding!).
Why can’t S2Member provide this functionality while developing? Just a switch in ‘General Options’ that says ‘I am developing’ or something like that.
It would make developing so much easier…
Maybe I’m overlooking some development-specific settings, somewhere, somehow…?

#2

If you’re happy to test without actually interacting with PayPal (and your anecdote about PMP Pro suggests that you are), then s2Member already provides what you are looking for. You just need a Stripe account.

Note that you don’t need to actually use Stripe, or pay Stripe in any way if you don’t want to (though, frankly, Stripe is so much better than PayPal that you might want to switch anyway). But you can set up a testing environment with Stripe – and it isn’t buggy. (What did I say about Stripe being better than PayPal?)

#3

Thanks Tim,
I didn’t think of that, just because I don’t have a Stripe account.
But I’ll get myself a Stripe account and see how that works.

#4

Haha, this is great!
I can now test with several accounts in Stripe Test modus.
Brilliant.