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PayPal X Developer Network Same as it Always Was
By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)
Like you,
I’ve been a member and user of PayPal’s service for years. They were early to the game and grew accordingly with a product that made buying online drop dead easy. With an exit to eBay they were integrated into a powerful money minting machine.
They also joined a culture of apathy and disdain for those that help them line their pockets – developers.
Like their acquirer, PayPal continued to build a mediocre developer community, foster it with partial code samples, limited information and limited support. Now in kindness to PayPal they did begin providing better support a few years ago and are pretty good when it comes to engaging developers on the message boards offering solutions – a problem that has plagued eBay for years.
Visit any eBay developer board and you’ll find replies that focus on posting in the wrong thread topic instead of offering a solution. It shows the developers that they aren’t a priority.
I was looking forward to the release of the brand spanking new PayPal X Developer Network. Hoping that my previous experience wouldn’t hold true and that there would be a renewed focus on the developers that are integrating the PayPal gateways and API’s into their platforms. But they let me down.
The new developer community site is plagued with broken links, the same old code samples and forums that stopped loading threads on October 28. The intention is there but the execution is hit and miss.
I can forgive them this time, though. Because it appears that their intention is to focus fully on their API implementations and integrate the legacy products like IPN and PDT into a more standardized solution.
Which will help PayPal as it moves toward working with developers to create a wider range of solutions like mobile and in application micro-payments.
Something else of note with the new PayPal X Developer Network is the improved site IA. Thank you to the person(s) that restructured the information and worked with the UI person(s) to highlight what developers want most . . . documentation.
DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0
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, eBay API , information architecture , paypal API , paypal IPN , paypal PDT , PayPal X Developer Network 
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I came across your blog while trying to actually find the now missing Paypal Developer network. Going to the forums now sends you to x.com which does not seem to have a new set of forums anywhere to be found. The login button for the old forums no longer works. Everything redirects back to the x.com home page. A circle of uselessness.
An exercise in pure frustration.
Nor can I figure out how to sign up for a developer account on x.com – it keeps trying to make me create a full PayPal buyer account complete with address, phone, etc. I just want to post on the forums! The forums used to be the only way to get any information, if you’re lucky. Thankfully my project is new and I think I might look into alternatives. Know any?
That is good to hear. Not good in the sense that it’s great that it can’t be found but good information to know. I was really hoping that this switch over would be more seamless. I too am working on a project that is currently in the PayPal sandbox.
For online payments I’ve used Authorize.net and used the services of MerchantPlus – http://www.merchantplus.com/
They’re not integrated with PayPal but they have full solutions for payment gateways written in PHP that work out of the box. I would recommend it as a solution to keep your project on track.
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