Technical & Scientific > Programming

My OpenVBX Theme

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micah:
Not sure if I posted about this before but I recently made a new theme for OpenVBX which is an online phone system (PBX) software used with Twilio.  Its kinda a niche app but its widely used.  It's open source but the only problem is that it hasn't been updated in years.  The UI  out of the box is just horribly dated.  It allows for theming and again, the few available themes are just gross.  So I made my own!  I spent several dozen hours working on it earlier this year and posted a demo video overview on youtube.  Between youtube and my facebook page, I've gotten 3 unsolicited requests from strangers on the Internet to download or buy my theme!

So this weekend, I just spent another dozen hours building out a page on my site that lets you do just that.  It integrates the stripe.com payment gateway and only allows authorized (read paid) users to download the files.  It also uses mailgun to send the confirmation e-mail which includes a registration number that can be used like a password to log back into the page at any time in the future to download the files again.

I'm pretty happy with the results.  Not sure if I will ever actually make a sale, but it was a fun experience building it all out.

Here's the page if you're interested Material design theme for OpenVBX.

ober:
Looks good man.  And I hope it takes off for you.  I always wonder the benefit of setting something like this up instead of just dealing directly with people for payment.  Also, how was the stripe integration?  I've wanted to use them in the past but never went for it.

One of my goals is to produce something that can be resold with no effort on my part.  All of my freelance work up to this point is pretty much one-off except for the hosting part of it, which still requires some level of support.  My wife on the other hand, who works with POD services, wakes up most mornings to new sales.  Literally, she's making money while she sleeps. 

micah:
Residual income is where its at.  Someday I hope to come up with something that can really make money. Not sure if it will be a SaaS or maybe just a successful site that gives me a cut of the sales. Who knows.

As for Stipe, I used their javascript library that just takes a couple lines of HTML on the front end.  That pulls in their JS and generates the entire front-end which the user fills out. It does all the validation and then pre-auths the transactions and POSTS back a token.

On the back end, I included their PHP SDK and just submit that token back to their API to make the actual charge.  The extent of the code basically looks like this:


--- Code: ---if(isset($_POST['stripeToken']))
         {
            require_once(_app_server_path.'core/libs/stripe/init.php');
           
            \Stripe\Stripe::setApiKey("sk_live_somerandomcodetheygameme");
           
            $token = $_POST['stripeToken'];
           
            // Charge the user's card:
            $charge = \Stripe\Charge::create(array(
              "amount" => 1900,
              "currency" => "usd",
              "description" => "Material theme for OpenVBX",
              "source" => $token,
            ));
           
            if($charge->status = "succeeded")
            {
                // my code to e-mail the use and save the transaction to the database etc.
             }
--- End code ---

Super easy!

ober:
Nice!  And yeah, personally, I want to come up with a SaaS solution (or several) that I know will make money.  To me, that's where it is at.  Depending on sales of individual items when taste/trends/whatever comes into play is too unpredictable.

micah:
I just made a sale!  This is so exciting.  :D

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