Add a PayPal shopping cart to your SmugMug galleries
thenickdude
Registered Users Posts: 1,302 Major grins
I have created an extension for Google Chrome which allows you to add PayPal "buy now" and "add to cart" buttons to a gallery full of photos at once. This works by automatically adding customised PayPal code to the captions of the photos you select, which causes those buttons to appear underneath your photos.
This extension is currently in Beta, so please take care to test it out on a couple of photos first before you apply it to an entire gallery!
You can find out more about this feature and download this extension on my website here:
http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/PayPal
Here's an example of the buttons in use, try adding a couple of photos to your cart!
http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/PayPal/Example-cart-gallery
(but don't check out, as my photos aren't for sale )
This extension is open source under the MIT License, you can read the sourcecode here:
https://github.com/Sherlock-Photography/smugmug-chrome-ext
This extension is currently in Beta, so please take care to test it out on a couple of photos first before you apply it to an entire gallery!
You can find out more about this feature and download this extension on my website here:
http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/PayPal
Here's an example of the buttons in use, try adding a couple of photos to your cart!
http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/PayPal/Example-cart-gallery
(but don't check out, as my photos aren't for sale )
This extension is open source under the MIT License, you can read the sourcecode here:
https://github.com/Sherlock-Photography/smugmug-chrome-ext
https://www.sherlockphotography.org/
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
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Any other downsides (apart from no captions - or garbage in the captions at least)
Cheers - N
http://www.nzsnaps.com (talkiet.smugmug.com)
Apart from the text from the PayPal button appearing in captions in some places where it shouldn't, there are a couple of downsides:
- Since it's applied per-photo, if you add more photos to the gallery later, you need to go in and add PayPal buttons to those new images
- If you edit a photo's caption, this change won't be reflected in the name that appears in the PayPal cart, until you re-apply the PayPal button
However, I think this is the best we're gonna get, because I doubt that SmugMug will add support for the old-style customisation within the next year.
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
Well done on coming up with what you have... Great lateral thinking.
Cheers - N
http://www.nzsnaps.com (talkiet.smugmug.com)
I will keep pestering smug to implement it in their standard cart as it's such a simple thing for them to do - I mean if zenfolio can add it overnight when they were asked it's obvious their just being 'petty'.
I will try to look at your set up again when I get a sec but having to redo buttons etc when photo's are added or removed is a bit out of my time scale.
I will for now have to rely on the customers sending me emails with their requests grrrrr
.DAVID.
Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but footprints
By no means could SmugMug integrate a PayPal option into their current cart system overnight. I've actually built a PayPal cart integration for my own (non-SmugMug) site. It'd probably take a several developer-months to achieve, plus the time taken for the design, testing, documentation, and support training.
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
You're right, but they COULD re-enable JS overnight, given that some customers do have access to it now - there's clearly a per user flag for stripping JS or not. Probably wouldn't even take until overnight...
Cheers - N
http://www.nzsnaps.com (talkiet.smugmug.com)
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
They are actually saying that a bottle of water is more dangerous than leaving your cellphone on.
If JS is that dangerous, why leave it alone for legacy users during such an extended transition ?
Cheers - N
http://www.nzsnaps.com (talkiet.smugmug.com)
JavaScript is still allowed on legacy because they could never turn that off without breaking more sites than a hacker would using bad custom JS. The switch to New SmugMug provided the first good opportunity to close this hole.
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
I owrked through your instructions and had no hickups.
The add to cart button does not show in the gallery.
Do I need to migrated to the new site or will it show in the preview mode?
Cheers, Rod
http://www.noendeng.com/
http://www.rollerderbyfotos.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rodnoendeng
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
I just added < html > tags to the info in the caption and the button show up on the legacy site but not the new site.
http://galleries.noendeng.com/Roller-derby-fotos/Open-Season-2013/13-03-09-Open-Season-Rnd-1-1/28411813_LBXG3c#!i=2411834426&k=h3zgKPM
Update - redid the code for the paypal buttons and will add to gallery images manually for now.
Thanks
http://www.noendeng.com/
http://www.rollerderbyfotos.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rodnoendeng
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
So I will probabley loose the buttons that I have now?
I entered these manually but have not tried without the < HTML > tags
only problem now is the file name is not showing.
http://www.noendeng.com/
http://www.rollerderbyfotos.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rodnoendeng
Can you post the PayPal code you were entering into the extension that didn't work? You weren't enclosing the code in more HTML code of your own were you?
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
Are you serious? SM intentionally blocked the code you wrote?
I think we'll hear a rep chime in shortly about how they're not against the idea of PayPal but they want to "do it right". Then all they need to do is wait a couple of years until everybody who needs PayPal leaves SmugMug, then they can forget about implementing it.
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
Have you contacted them directly about this?
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
What's the BS reason.... oh, they can't get their cut if we can use paypal and self fulfill orders...
Come on Smugmug, stop being such underhanded, secretive ..
You know what? I give up, I can't comment on this effectively and stay on the right side of any personal good taste filters.
Smugmug, I'm really disappointed in you, again.
Cheers - N
http://www.nzsnaps.com (talkiet.smugmug.com)
It's amazing how a company that I used to praise to everyone can so completely reverse their image so quickly. And you know what the saddest part is? The new SM is awesome in most ways, and far superior to legacy. Unforunately, that doesn't really matter if you systematically ignore and anger customers.
You are a seriously talented guy who is doing some amazing stuff on SmugMug, which everyone loves. And I know you must've done some serious work on this, only to have us cut you off. If that happened to me, I'd be deflated too.
I know this looks like we're trying to kill self-fulfillment but it's really not about that. Brian mentioned in his email to you that we made a decision to eliminate HTML forms but he didn't explain why. But you're so knowledgeable about security I'm sure you'll immediately know why.
Someone else said they were bummed that we hide behind the need to do it right and really we must be covering up a selfish motive. But since we launched we've added a number of things like Wufoo forms, stat counter, Vimeo app, plus both Google Calendar and AdSense are in test (AdSense is a pain to test so it will probably take longer than Google Calendar).
The heroes have received many angry emails about AdSense since launch and I think the anger comes from imagining that we don't want ads on the site or we want a cut of the action. Actually, we just want to be more secure and to make the solution available to more people like it will be if it's built in. Our solution is not going to give us a cut.
Internally, we know there will be many threads like this where it's not responsible to go into details about security, but the right thing to do for everyone, including the most angry people, is to take reasonable steps towards better security. Some day the flames will be much hotter if we don't.
Come on... Since the initial flurry of posts (including the ones insisting that Paypal still worked and provided it was done just with HTML it would be ok), there has been DEAFENING SILENCE on this topic.
Yes, you owed Lamah an apology for changing the rules after he developed a very clever workaround within what the rules were at the time, but you still owe your existing customers an honest evaluation of the intent and likely timeframes to support custom Javascript (or at least Paypal and Self Fulfillment)
How about answering the clear intent of this post, instead of ignoring it, or talking around the question?
Cheers - N
http://www.nzsnaps.com (talkiet.smugmug.com)
When we first saw Lamah's PayPal shopping cart trick, our reaction was, "Wow, that's really cool!" Followed shortly thereafter by, "Wait...if a *good* person can do that, what could an *evil* person do with the same power?" Which, incidentally, has been our reaction to several of Lamah's awesome hacks.
Lamah is a clever guy, and we also think he's pretty trustworthy. But there are some people out there who are almost as clever as Lamah, but not nearly as trustworthy. SmugMug has always been about giving people powerful customization tools, and that means letting you get your hands dirty with HTML and CSS (and, in legacy SmugMug, even JavaScript). This is great, but it opens up a lot of avenues for bad people to potentially do bad things, and the last thing we want is for someone to do bad things to our customers, so we have to be pretty careful.
The issue in this case is that we're allowing custom HTML forms in image captions and gallery descriptions. Lamah used this in a good way, to provide PayPal integration. We definitely don't mind that -- we want you guys to be able to do cool stuff!
But in order to implement a PayPal "Add to cart" button, you have to use a element, which submits a form to PayPal's site. When we started thinking about this, it occurred to us that a malicious person could cause a form to be submitted to a fake site that just *looks* like PayPal. If they could trick a SmugMug user into entering their PayPal username and password on that site, then they could potentially gain access to that user's PayPal account and steal money. This is calling phishing, and it's one of the primary avenues through which no-good rotten scumbags commit identity theft on the web.
This got us thinking about other ways a no-good rotten scumbag might phish SmugMug users, and we realized we needed to make some changes to keep everyone safe and secure.
The last thing we want to do is take valuable functionality away from our users, so we had a pretty extensive internal debate about the best way to deal with this. On the one hand, we want to keep everyone safe. On the other hand, we want SmugMug to be highly customizable, and we didn't want to have to tell Lamah that we were going to break his clever PayPal trick.
In the end, we came up with a plan that involves what we think is a necessary compromise. Since this involves the security of the site and our users, I won't go into detail until we've implemented it, but one aspect of it is that we plan to stop allowing elements in image captions and gallery descriptions.
Brian, our director of engineering, reached out to Lamah to give him an early heads up since we felt bad that we hadn't thought of this stuff until he had already devoted time and effort to working on this, and we didn't want to waste any more of his time.
We tried really hard to come up with a good way to be safe about this without breaking Lamah's PayPal code, but the truth is that anything we let the good guys do, the bad guys can do too. In the end, we made the hard decision that keeping our users safe was the most important thing.
It's not fun making decisions like this, especially without asking for feedback from the community, but as Baldy said above, when it comes to security issues, it's sometimes a Catch-22. We believe that most of our users are wonderful, lovely people with the best intentions, but we can't ignore the possibility that there may also be people out there whose intentions are less honorable, and we don't want to give them a heads up about potential security issues they could exploit.
I hope this at least clarifies some of the reasoning behind our thinking. Once we get some of these changes implemented, I'll be more than happy to go into the nitty gritty details for anyone who's interested.
Based on your logic, if something CAN POSSIBLY be used for evil, you WILL NOT allow it on the site. In the context of your post, we're NEVER getting Javascript back. Am I right?
I really, really, REALLY want an official answer to this query - it's not a rhetorical question.
Cheers - Neil G
http://www.nzsnaps.com (talkiet.smugmug.com)
Literally the same risk applies to any off-site link. There's nothing stopping anyone from adding a PayPal "buy now" button to their SmugMug page which is actually a link (<a> element) to a website they control, with or without using a <form> element. I can think of additional security risks of allowing form elements, but this isn't one of them.
Also, if <form> elements are a concern, why not also block them in HTML Content Blocks?
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
Security is all about tradeoffs. The most secure website in the world is a blank white page with no features, but who would want to use that website? As with everything we do, we want to find the right balance of security and features that will please the most people and keep the most people safe.
While there are some things we will never compromise on, such as how we store passwords, or how we handle payment information, there are other cases where we believe there's a sweet spot, and that's what we're aiming for.
When it comes to JavaScript, the main issue is one of trust. If we can trust someone not to be evil, then we can allow that person to host custom JavaScript on SmugMug. But how do we decide who to trust? Do we trust everyone by default unless they do something bad? Do we trust no one by default unless they first prove themselves to be good? Or do we aim for a middle ground?
We want to find the sweet spot. Sometimes that can be really, really hard, and we know that if we make promises and then end up having to break them, people will be upset (and rightly so!). For that reason, we try not to make promises unless we know we can keep them. Sometimes this means we have to keep quiet about things we're not ready to talk about yet, but one thing I can promise you is that we're working incredibly hard on this stuff every day, and our primary metric for success is whether we make our users happy.
I can think of additional security risks too, but the last thing I'm gonna do is list them all here before fixing them.
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!