Drupal + Microsoft project Week 1 (w/c 1/March/2010)

Blogging about the project's progress and Microsoft's tools is one of the requirements so I'll be blogging about these topics weekly.

Here's a list of things I did last week (w/c 1/March/2010):

1. Researching on existing payment modules
2. Configuring the IIS server

1. Researching on existing payment modules

Drupal offers over 5k modules and we often find a module that does what you want to do. It is due diligence to check whether what you need has already been built before deciding to build one. FYI, the reason for not using Ubercart or CiviCRM is detailed in my comment for the responses to a previous post.
I searched payment-related modules at drupal.org that and I found about 120 modules, many of which were related to Ubercart. The modules I found would be useful were Simple Payments and Simple Paypal. Since we want to accept multiple gateways, the former is preferred. However the way Simple Payments works seems rather strange to me - it helps developers to build custom payment system for different payment gateways, but it doesn't seem to fully abstract the process that payment gateways cannot be switched without some coding. This is not what I want.
So the other option is to use Simple Paypal, but we then won't be able to use any other gateways. I will need to take this path if there are no other options, but I'm still holding back…

I found Nedjo Rogers module called Payment API (D5), which had never seen a release but he is a skilled developer and he has done some good foundation work. I've contacted him about the module, what he is going to do with it and if he has merged his work with others' modules, as he mentioned in the issue queue.

2. Configuring the IIS server

I logged into the virtual box that Microsoft has set up for us and the first thing I saw was the message "Windows activation - Windows is not genuine". :D

What I found strange was that, I could not have access to the box using the admin credential while another user was already logged in with the same credential. This is something you can do with Linux out-of-box afaik so I thought it was a bit strange.

I then set up a user for each of our member and gave them the admin access to the box. But in order to administer users, you have to go to 'Administrative tools', then select 'Administer computer'. You then open 'Local users and groups', but I found it a bit odd to have 'users' within your 'computer'. This is more of an issue with information architecture and how you conceptualise 'user' in the system, but for me 'computer' consists of hardware and software, but nothing to do with wetware.

IIS manager was pretty easy to use. I'm so used to typing 'sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/[site name]' and changing all the configs, but it provides a nice GUI to set up a new vhost. It would be nice to have a tool like this for apache.

I haven't install Drupal on it yet, but that will be one of the tasks for the next week.