Brilliant Thinking

BBC NEWS | Business | [Protx] Payments service ‘goes offline’

Oops. It just goes to show that despite “test, test, test” even critical systems upgrades don’t always go to plan.

We have a number of clients with Protx integrations and the new payment gateway that was launched today also introduced its own technical issues for developers. Although the original launch was billed as allowing website owners to customise the look of their payment pages “without the aid of a web developer”, the actual reality is very different. The system just launched requires that payment pages are customised using XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) - no “user friendly” customisation tools, just hard-core, complicated coding.

According to Protx “You will need to know XSLT, and we cannot help you there. Our support team will ONLY check your pages before uploading, and we CANNOT do your debugging for you. There are plenty of books available on the subject, and your web developers will definitely be able to help you. XSLT is pretty standard these days.”

On a recent straw poll of the WAUK mailing list approx 50% of developers admitted to having some experience with XSLT, but only approx 20% had current experience. Which means approx 80% of developers (based on a sample response of 35 over a 24 hour period) have little or no experience of XSLT.

Fortunately, since Protx do provide the XSLT templates, it is possible for developers to produce branded versions of the payment pages for their clients. The XSLT templates are basically HTML templates with lots of special tags (the XSLT) which tells the Protx server how to display the Protx generated content. The developer (at the bare minimum) need only produce new HTML to display a branded page and re-use the XSLT tags that are already provided. The level of XSLT knowledge required is actually relatively minimal - you just need to be a competent developer to move the XSLT blocks around and drop in a few of your own images or CSS files. It’s the slow and steady approach.

At first glance, the Protx release about producing customised payment pages for their new system is a little scary if you’re not used to XSLT, but the reality is that it’s relatively straightforward - especially if you have also had some experience with Worldpay’s systems (although they don’t use XSLT, they do have a similar tagging engine).