Hello my friends!

I have the pleasure to announce the newest addition to the myLANsite Lanparty Components suite. This new component and the new version of the Events component bring you what is most sought by many lanparty organization teams.
Although all those fancy Lanparty CMS are very great and offer an extensive range of features, most of the time, it takes you longer to administer all the tasks, users, tournaments and especially payments in the system. And the latter is the point that I am addressing with this new component...

The new component, called com_mls_payments, helps you manage all the payments easily and even without any user interaction. In addition, you can create your own packages for the event so that users can't just pay for events. They even can create full memberships. Please read on to learn more about it.

With the new version of the Events component, you get a new section in the adminitration interface.
The "Times" sections lets you define different times that users will be able to book. I heared about events that go the whole weekend through (Friday throught to Sunday) where the organization team wants to offer people to just book for one specific day. This is where you can define this! You don't have to use this functionaliy if you don't want to. But it gives you an unexpected level of flexibility later on - you'll see.

Afterwards, you go to the "Packages" site in the new Payments component. If you click on "New", you can see the screen that is here on the right.
It just gives you a slight overview of the different packages you can make. Here again listed for you to outline its capabilities:

Membership: Offer Memberships that last a time defined by you. So for example, sell a 3-Months membership which entitles everybody who paid for this package to attend every lan within the next 3 Months for free. You can even offer them additional Goodies, just enter them in the package description field (e.g. Free drinks, a T-Shirt, ...)

Predefined amount of Events: Create a package that entitles a buyer to attend X number of lans without having to pay for them.

Specific Event in a package: Generally just pay for one event. Here, you can also choose what timeframe users that buy that package pay for (define in the step I described before - remember?). You can choose to create a package for the whole event or just for a specified timeframe.

And here comes the really neat stuff! People can pay for all those packages you created - By just clicking a PayPal button!
And the great news for you: It is completely self-administering. Using PayPal's Instant Payment Notification Service (IPN), all payments that are made get immediately transferred to your myLANsite website, where (after several steps of approval) the payment gets activated. So your users can go and get their seat and enrol for tournaments 1 Second after they've made their payment via PayPal.

And even If you're not using PayPal. The users get a unique payment code on the screen you see above. If they send you the payment (via bank transfer, cheque, whatever) they just quote this code, go then go to the page you see here on the left, add a new payment and just enter this code. Very time-saving as well. You don't have to search for usernames via realname or email in the participants list anymore! If _that_ aren't great news!

And last but not least, the configuration of that neat little tool. I think, with these option, it wouldn't leav any open wishes.
If a PayPal Payment needs your action (if somebody tries to fake the IPN for example), go automatically get an email with the last 5 Payments. This email is fully configurable with all the variables and data you need.
It does also support switching between the sandbox-URL and the real PayPal url because you might want to test this feature out before you go live!

Recapitulatory, there is to say: This is a feature that might save you loads of time. I think, especially in the US where PayPal is more widely spread amongst all people and where nearly everybody has a CreditCard or at least a Visa Debit. But it has been designed to also bring improvements to organization teams that still manage their payments manually.

The extensive check of PayPal IPNs brings you an extra level of security and the big number of well explained error code helps you track down, where exactly an error occured (if there was one), or what exactly somebody wanted to fake!

Todo:
- Alter the seatmap component so users can reserve a seat just for the time they booked!

Known bugs:
Payment via PayPal does not work properly if a price has a value after the comma (e.g. 3.50 USD, 3 USD would work)