I can't quite believe it's been a whole year since we started Papertank, but today marks our first official Birthday!

Just looking through my projects folder, which is, admittedly, a bit of a mess, I can count over 20 projects this past year ranging from cms websites and flash adverts to e-commerce sites and bespoke web applications.

With the current onslaught of Zombie realted TV shows, films comics and video games, some people have been saying that it's hard to find the good ones to focus on.

But these people are wrong.

Magento is a great e-commerce platform, and the built-in integration with PayPal cuts down on your development time and saves you having to trawl through the PayPal developer docs or use a third party module.

If you are on Website Payments Standard, you can setup Magento really quickly and use the built-in options to redirect people to the PayPal payments page upon order confirmation. Of course, as people seasoned with PayPal know though, the focus of this payment page is to login into or create a new PayPal account. Customers are usually confused as they have to fish around on the page to see the 'Don't have a PayPal account? Use your credit card or bank account (where available)' link.

The alternative to the standard edition is Website Payments Pro, whereby users aren't required to have a PayPal account and card details can be taken on your website. Magento integrates straight up with this version of PayPal, and after you plug in your login details and API key, you'll find a new debit / credit card form on the order checkout. What many using Magento won't be aware of though is that taking card details on your website, even if you don't store them, will incur the wrath of PCI compliance and security issues. In a nutshell, you will have to pay for and pass quarterly compliance checks on your site and take responsibility for the security of Magento and your server, both of which are normally outwith your control.

The solution - Payments Pro Hosted Edition...

Just taking the chance to say Happy New Year. Hope your’s has started off well.
We have some really exciting ideas that we’re looking forward to working on in 2011.
If you know anyone that is looking for any kind of web project though, please do send them our way – we’d be really grateful .

All the best,

David & Chris.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the term, a Content Management System, or just cms, is a piece of software that you access online to create and manage the content on your website, be it pages, blog articles, images, or video.