Setting up a Charity Donation Box using Ubercart, Realex, & Ubercart Donations

It has been awhile since I've posted anything technical!

I'm working on adding a donate feature to the Sunyata Retreat Centre website.  This involved downloading the latest Ubercart module for Drupal 6.x and looking up all the modules that may or may not help in setting up the feature. 

UC_add_donation (looked at and disabled), UC_donation, UC_realex were what I ended up installing.  The first module (UC_add_donation) worked great but depended on you having other products available.  This would be fine in the future when the site has the functionality for signing up for retreats and paying a deposit online.  However, for the moment what suited the retreat centre's needs more was the UC_donation module which allows you to add the amount you want to donate and click "Donate" (after editing the button wording).  As for UC_realex, Realex is the company of choice for most Irish and possibly other european companies/banks for handling credit card transcations. 

One challenge was in changing a 'shopping cart' to something more like a 'donation cart/box'.  Afterall, you're not purchasing an item - you're giving a donation or a deposit.  So I did what I've almost never done, and edited the uc_cart.module file in ubercart so that "Shopping cart" is replaced with "Donation cart".  Same goes with running through all instances of dialogue and re-wording to suit the use case.  This was after checking on drupal.org and finding a similiar issue with this action as the recommended fix.

My next hurdle will be to set up already existing retreats as something to "book" by submitting a deposit online. 

The Sunyata Centre in County Clare, Ireland, is currently in great need of donations and other such contributions to keep providing a comfortable meditation and retreat centre.  They are an Irish Charity (Charitable Tax Exemption Number: CHY 17855) and all donations go towards the upkeep of the centre and the travel expenses of the teachers/instructors as needed.  For more information please visit their website: www.sunyatacentre.org.

(Please stay tuned to "Ahasaetharu" on twitter if you want to know when the link will be up to make a donation! - I'm still waiting on the set up of the account on the RealEx side of things.)

As for my review of Ubercart - I simply love it!  Being a virgin to e-commerce meant that I had to click around multiple times looking at everything upside and down before I had myself properly familiarized with the interface and how it worked.  It helps to create a product and then to run through the purchasing process to see all of the interfaces.  Downloading and installing the uc_donation module also helped in making things easier for me to understand. 

Like all things in Drupal 6.x, there is nothing that can't be done - but you have to tinker with everything a bit before its set up to your specific use case.  So it's not completely straight forward, but once up and running - you're flying.