Centarro held a productive sprint at DrupalCon Prague on all things Drupal Commerce. Goals for the sprint included planning future Commerce Core improvements, packaging full releases of the modules included in Commerce Kickstart, and catching up on some long overdue marketing tasks. That including rolling out a new project homepage and planning an approach for the project blog to focus on release announcements - like this one!

Commerce PayPal is one of our oldest, most popular payment integration modules. It is included by default in Commerce Kickstart, a distribution of Drupal that makes it easy to start building on Drupal Commerce. Our integration module was one of the first to integrate PayPal Checkout and the Smart Payment Buttons API in open source, and through it we maintain integrations for merchants on older APIs, including Express Checkout, Payflow, and Payflow Link. We reviewed the module and finalized a variety of pending patches in order to tag a full release.

One longstanding request for merchants using Drupal Commerce in physical retail environments was to be able to accept payment via Venmo. Venmo is one of the largest digital wallet services in the US (owned by PayPal as of 2013) and one I've long used personally for sharing costs with friends and family or paying / tipping service providers. However, its terms of service and its capabilities as a mobile app prevented its use for retail transactions ... until last year!

Toward the end of 2021, PayPal added Venmo support to their Smart Payment Buttons API and approached us about adding support for it to our integration. With Commerce PayPal 8.x-1.1 or later, merchants can enable the Venmo button on their checkout forms so customers can shop on their phones and use the Venmo app to pay. Paired with a mobile responsive theme like Kickstart's Belgrade, this makes Drupal Commerce even more capable for mobile transactions. Read more about merchant eligibility in the PayPal documentation.

The PayPal Checkout integration identifies the funding source for any payment in its order's data array. In order to surface this data so the merchant and customers can see which PayPal service was used to pay for an order, we've made an order.funding_source variable available for use in your site's Twig templates as well. Give it a try and let us know in the queue if you have further ideas for improving the integration.