Detailed Plan
This project proposes to build a plugin for anyone with a WordPress, Laravel, or PHP website to easily accept ADA as a payment option.
The plugin will include a setup wizard to guide users through set-up steps. Users can choose to accept ADA payments directly, or to connect to a COTI account if preferred. (To the extent that it's possible, the plugin would collect info and setup your COTI accounts for you - much like the way first-time Stripe setup works in WordPress!). The wizard would also guide users to the WooCommerce payment settings page, where they can enable/disable the tool.
To do this, we will create a PHP SDK (Softward Developement Kit). This involves original coding work, as well as testing and refining code elements that are available in existing code libraries for the latest COTI / ADA Pay API.
The final product will be delivered as:
-- a WordPress "Plugin", listed on the WordPress Plugin Directory
-- a Laravel "Package", available on Packagist.org and GitHub.
-- a PHP Open Library for use on any PHP based website
Our design intent is that 90% of users would be able to use the plugin "out of the box" - no developer experience necessary! NFT Artists, E-Commerce sites, and NGOs could start accepting ADA payments and donations immediately. For advanced integrations, developers would be able use and customize the PHP SDK directly.
The package and plugin wrapper will deploy with a 90% use case opinionated defaults with special consideration for NFT artists with little no programming experience.
More advance developers will be able to use the PHP SDK directly for custom integrations.
About Lido Nation
At Lido Nation, our mission is Cardano education, outreach, and global community building: Because the Future is for Everyone!
Our site invites community involvement by providing an interface to submit new content, comment and respond to existing content, record audio versions of articles, and propose new article ideas.
We are building new tools to teach blockchain content and promote humanitarian values, by using "real" Cardano blockchain tokens and transactions to allow community members to direct our charitable giving!
We have 40 articles published, covering a range of Cardano topics. We skip the hype and focus on the real good stuff that is happenning in Cardano, with the aim of publishing content that is understandable to newcomers, and educational for everybody.
We do not use any third party API for connecting the Cardano blockchain, and we run our own Cardano servers pieces.
We run a Cardano Developer Mentorship Lab in Kenya:
With 5 high power computers running Cardano infrastructure, trainees learn the ropes of developing on the Cardano network.
We mentor them to work with the Cardano architecture to solve a wide range of business problems.
Specific architecture pieces we run:
* Dbsync
* Relay node
* GraphQL
* Hasura
* Ogmios
* Wallet backend
* tx-submit api
* Plutus Application Backend [testnet only]
* PostgreSQL
* Prometheus
Motivation
We see that the next frontier of growth for Cardano won't be confined to Developer forums and GitHub repositories. Instead, it will be among our friends and small businesses, as they start to see and understand the applications of blockchain technology for their own lives and services. We hope they will see Cardano as the most exciting project out there, and we want to provide trusted resources and open source tools to help them learn, get build, and contribute.
Our Values
We believe that Cardano is a powerful platform paving the way for a future that works for everyone. To help connect that future with "everyone", information and resources must be available to all kinds of people, and written by all kinds of people. So we put a high value on accessibility and cross-cultural collaboration:
Explain groundbreaking technology in simple terms.
Provide a User-Friendly interface and thoughtful resources for non developers.
Facilitate original content creation from across cultures, via collaboration with our Lab in Kenya, and via content contribution channels on our site.
Above all, encourage people to get involved. We are huge fans of Project Catalyst and are excited to grow our capacity as leaders and mentors helping people to onboard into a variety of roles and participation with Project Catalyst.
Challenge Metric: increase the number and the quality of Cardano Open Source projects
--> Not only is the initial codebase being developed by an enterprise software engineer with over 14 of experience, it will be open source from day one for all to contribute.
Challenge Metric: increase the number of contributors
--> We are running a Cardano mentorship program in Kenya; Currently there are active mentees, and we have been funded to add 2 more starting in April 2022. This means new bright minds joining the the Cardano development community. They will be contributing to this project, and using it as a launching pad to other projects
Challenge Metric: increase of open source tools and frameworks from the community for the community (dog-fooding)
--> There is no user-friendly open source tool for ecommerce with ADA right now. This will give - for example- every single NFT artist currently in the Cardano ecosystem a free open source ecommerce solution. It will also increase Cardano exposure to the 400 million plus sites in the WordPress community by deploying the plugin to the WordPress economy.
COTI pay is not entirely open to the public yet; access to this new tool occurs through community networking and cooperating with the COTI team. We are already reaching out to the winners of the Fund 7 COTI challenge to start establishing those relationships.