How to Sell Digital Goods with CodeIgniter: New Premium Tutorial

Dan Harper on Sep 15th 2010 with 39 comments

Tutorial Details

Program: PHP
Version: >=5
Difficulty: Intermediate
Estimated Completion Time: 1 - 2 hours

Download Source Files

Thanks for supporting the site, feel free to download the ZIP file for this tutorial.
Source files for this tutorial are available to Premium members.
Get a Premium Membership

In today’s tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a small web app to sell digital items (eg. eBooks) securely and accept payments from PayPal. Become a Premium member to read this tutorial, as well as hundreds of other advanced tutorials and screencasts.

Join Net Premium

For those unfamiliar, the family of Tuts+ sites runs a premium membership service. For $19 per month, you gain access to exclusive premium tutorials, screencasts, and freebies from Nettuts+, Psdtuts+, Aetuts+, Audiotuts+, Vectortuts+, and CgTuts+ For the price of a pizza, you’ll learn from some of the best minds in the business. Become a Premium member to read this tutorial, as well as hundreds of other advanced tutorials and screencasts.

Other Awesome Premium Tuts you may Like

Dan Harper is danharper on Themeforest

Enjoyed this Post?

Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!

By Dan Harper

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

Dan is passionate about an open, semantic web and loves playing around with the latest bleeding-edge technologies in our industry. He works mostly in PHP, but wishes he only had the time/job to pick up Rails fully. He’s studying Web Technologies at the University of Portsmouth and is currently Lead Developer at Radweb.

Plus Premium

Note: Want to add some source code? Type <pre><code> before it and </code></pre> after it. Find out more

http://www.twitter.com/mamunabms Abdullah Al Mamun
I’m badly in need of a mooneybookers php class for CodeIgniter as some countries do not allow transaction via PayPal.
Thanks.

http://eyoosuf.com Yoosuf
not some, many!

Eduardo Barros
Hello, just a question: Will this tutorial use paypal IPN (Instant Payment Notification)? If so, I’ll probably buy Premium for this.

http://danharper.me Dan Harper
Yes it does :)

Carlos
Damn!
My premium account just expired las week :(
http://www.sahutbaju.com Honby
I can’t login the premium membership.
Seth
Awesome! I’m looking forward to going through this later on. And just to clearify…this is completely secure to use in the real world right now? and should work just fine with selling, for example, psd files?

w1sh
“Completely secure” is kind of relative isn’t it?
I’d trust a CodeIgniter package with XSS filtering and prepared statements to handle an e-marketplace.

http://www.iamhenry.me Henry
Can I purchase this Tutorial in the Marketplace?

http://net.tutsplus.com Jeffrey Way
Henry – It’s just a matter of when Dan uploads it there. :)

http://www.iamhenry.me Henry
Looking forward to purchase it Dan!
http://eyoosuf.com Yoosuf
:D
http://ojs.at Oliver
looking forward to buy it too :)

http://danharper.me Dan Harper
I’ll be uploading it in a few days as I’m away right now.

t_wrecks
Looks like a great tut. I am looking forward to picking this up on the tutorials marketplace when it is made available.

http://www.jsxtech.com Jaspal Singh
Simple enough to sell digital goods.
Thanks for sharing.
dan
Meh people should really get away from Paypal and Moneybookers … it’s hardly ever used in some countries, seriously how hard is it to setup creditcard payments :P?
Paypal / Moneybookers is the only reason I don’t have a nettuts plus account … i just prefer to pay via creditcard.
Mcquam
Login isn’t working so I can’t see the files.
http://www.psdstyle.net Chuckles
Interesting article – I struggled through CodeIgniter over a year ago trying to do just this. Well not just this actually more detailed. But either way I would have killed to read this tut way back then…..
http://tutorial-city.net/ Tutorial City
In this tutorial the author creates a library or just set up everything in the controller?
A reader
Gotta love Pul.ly eh.
http://thedevelopertuts.com Bratu Sebastian
Cool man!
Great tutorial, I think I will buy it from the markeplace, as I am only interested in this one. I hope it covers IPN
subrat
I am a premium member and I can not download the source files.
http://spotdex.com Davidmoreen
Wow what a super cool app.
I’ve totally changed my perception of Codeigniter and frameworks as a hole. Not just based on this tut, not on the fact that Codeigniter makes doing things a lot faster and certainly more fun!
Neil
Can I ask, when the user gets sent the item – do they get given a unique url to download the item?

http://danharper.me/ Dan Harper
Yes, they’re emailed a download URL unique to them. As an ‘extra’ section at the end of the tutorial, we use the unique URL to allow download restrictions (eg. up to 4 times every 7 days).

david
i am also a member and cannot view the source files
Stefano
+1 that would buy the item if uploaded to the marketplace :)
http://www.windkr89.nl Erik
Thanks, tutorials like this are the reason I joined Tutsplus Premium. Looking forward to see more like this!
http://www.stefanogiordano.it Stefano
I bought it on the Marketplace, a very well done tutorial, with commented code and working example! :)
arnold
I hope nettuts will come up more tutorials like these, nobody really covers a tutorial which will use Paypal
same question with Sebastian , does it cover IPN?

http://danharper.me Dan Harper
Yep, it uses IPN.

OSXBOY
Stefano where did you find this on the Marketplace can you supply a URL as I’m interested in buying this one.
TIA

OSXBOY
Oh how foolish I feel now I’ve scrolled to the top of the page and seen:
Not Premium? This tutorial is available on the Tuts+ Marketplace
:-)

http://magpielabs.co.uk Yoosuf
rather paying $5 one month subscription is $9 go for that

Tommie
Can we see a real life example using this code?
Agha Zair Ali
If you need any help related to PAYPAL Pro using code igniter, you can write me back and I will send you the library I’ve created for codeigniter.
http://simperit.dk Kevin Simper
Hi Dan Harper
Very good tutorial, not for beginners, but defenitly easy to understand.
I just dont get:
Why do you not check if the customer actully paid the price you set?
The customer can change it to just pay 1 cent, and he would get the product, because nothing checks it.
You should change the hash to be without the time, and then when you get the data back from Paypal, make a new hash and compare them each other, then you will be sure!
Maybe i should make my own tutorial explaining that!? :P
Kevin Simper
http://www.simonbacquie.com Simon Bacquie
Hey, awesome tutorial, very useful. I adapted some of this code in an app I’m working on, and I just wanted to point out a small mistake, not sure if anyone caught it yet.
In testing I found that in my order records, the Paypal transaction ID wouldn’t end up in the database, it’d just be null. I eventually figured out why–in your confirm_payment() function, the parameter for that is called $payment_txn_id, but within the function, it looks for $paypal_txn_id… not quite the same variable name ;) so the value never reached the database.