One Place for All Your Money: The Payment Module
Whether it's the shop, membership, or a donation—it all runs through the same door in the end.
The moment money needs to change hands on a website, things get messy fast. One payment provider for the shop, another for memberships, yet another for donations—each with its own credentials, its own configuration, its own potential for things to go wrong. PlaCeMS takes a different approach: a single Payment Module handles all payment processing, centrally, for every other module.
One Module, Multiple Providers
Instead of locking you into a single payment provider, the Payment Module works with interchangeable gateway components. Currently supported are PayPal and Stripe—two of the most widely used payment providers in the world, each with its own cleanly encapsulated integration.
And if another provider needs to be added down the line, a new gateway can simply be plugged in as its own building block, without touching the module's core. That's the same principle that runs through all of PlaCeMS—extensible, without ever having to modify the existing system.
One Interface for Every Module
Here's the real advantage: other modules—shop, membership, donations—no longer need to worry about payment integration themselves. They simply talk to the Payment Module, which handles the rest: creating a payment, confirming it, and checking its status.
For you as the site owner, that means setting up your payment providers once—not once per module. If a new paid feature comes along later, the payment processing for it is already in place.
Credentials Kept Securely Encrypted
Payment provider credentials are some of the most sensitive information a website can hold. That's why PlaCeMS never stores them as plain text somewhere in the system—they're encrypted and kept outside the publicly accessible web directory, protected by their own dedicated key, independent of other security mechanisms in the system.
Even if someone gained unauthorized access to the file storage, the actual credentials would remain protected.
Test First, Then Go Live
Before real money changes hands, every payment provider can be thoroughly tested in sandbox mode—orders, payment confirmations, the entire flow, without any real transactions taking place. Only once everything works exactly as intended do you switch over to live operation.
That way, you only go live once you're genuinely confident it works.
Only If You Need It
Like every PlaCeMS module, the Payment Module is completely optional. If you're not running a shop, a paid membership area, or collecting donations, you simply don't need to install it—and PlaCeMS keeps working exactly as normal without it.
One central place for every money-related question, no matter which module needs payments—set it up once, use it everywhere.