Creating a payment processor for a church site

My church recently asked to have payment processing added to its web sites.  (Yes, we have two sites now: one for the church and a second for the youth group that serves multiple churches in Sonoma County.)  I did some studying of the options and decided to use Ubercart.  CiviCRM would have worked, but it seemed like a lot of overhead when all I wanted was payment processing.  On Drupal, there were two primary choices: e-Commerce and Ubercart.  Ubercart seemed like the more used, more up to date, and the more supported site at the current time.  (One thing I have learned with Drupal modules is that what is supported well today may not be so well supported tomorrow, but there are risks to all open source and commercial software products.)

So I went with Ubercart.  So far, it has been a good decision.  I was able to implement payment processing for several purposes, and we got our first donation before we were fully ready to do the back end processing.  Our treasurer will do the back end processing.  He will receive an email from the web site detailing the payment, and an email from PayPay summarizing the payment.  We chose to use PayPay Website Payments Standard as our method for payment processing.  It provides a no fee solution except for the actual transaction fees.  All of the secure processing is done on PayPal's site, so we did not need to implement an https: protocol, which saves us the cost of the security certificate.

I have already gotten several requests for additional payment types.  With Ubercart, it is as easy as creating another "product" and then linking the product to a page that will guide a site user to the need.

We are still on Drupal 5 for the church web site, as there are still a few modules that I used that are not quite at a supported release on Drupal 6.  But new development for Ubercart, and other things as well, are often done only for Drupal 6, so I will have to tackle migration soon.