Today I have been working on using the PayPoint service to accept credit card payments on a site I am working on.

I have found the integration process to be fairly painless and reasonably secure (using MD5 hashes for both the payment submission request and the callback). Their check out is theme-able using HTML template files, so you can get a lot of flexibility.

For me though, the best thing about PayPoint is that their test system and their live system is the same platform, all you do is pass a different test URL parameter to enable the test mode.

This is so much easier than using a slow sandbox, like PayPal requires you to do.

On the subject of payment gateways, Authorize.Net had a major outage today due to a fire in their data centre. I just checked and they are back on-line now, but their will have taken a major credibility hit for this length of downtime.

In the last few days I have been teaching myself a new PHP Framework, Kohana.

Kohana is based on CodeIgniter, which I know, so I hoped it would be a shallow learning curve - I was right.

Several features attracted me to Kohana:

• UTF8 compliance
• Based on CodeIgniter
• Strict Object Oriented style

I had originally intended to learn Zend Framework, as I am going to be using this heavily at work. I did spend several days getting my head around ZF, only to decide that it really wasn't suited to small projects, and decided to give Kohana a go.

My only real stumbling block was the way the Form Validation worked. Although very similar to CI, the custom error messages for form validation rules took me a while to figure out. This was mainly because of the remnants of an old validation library still left in the stable distribution which I was using as an (incorrect) example.

Still, apart from an hour or so reading up on the validation, the process has been smooth and mostly pain free. I can see some definite improvements over Code Igniter, so all in all very happy with it.

PHP 5.2.10 was released a few days ago.

At work we use a PHP script to monitor some of our MSSQL databases for data state, and immediately after upgrading they all started flagging connectivity issues.

This was not what I wanted at 17:15 on a Friday evening! Turns out that the server had not gone down, but infact PDO DBLIB in PHP 5.2.10 is broken and is unable to connect any more.

Seems there is a bug open for this already for PHP 5.3, however it is now affecting the stable branch.

So I spent Friday evening re-writing the scripts to use the good-old MSSQL module, which thankfully still works.

This is my first post on my new blogging site.

I am planning to use this page to blog about aspects of life that interest me, most probably focussing on the open source community.

Expect to read about Linux, Apache and other web related topics.

Tom P