Having an issue with my PayPal buttons…

I’m getting this error from the buttons I produce:

Invalid Regular period. You must specify valid values for the A3, P3, and T3 parameters for a subscription.

It takes me to PayPal then shows that. I’m going through s2Member to make my buttons.

I would say disregard, since I think I know the initiation of the problem and it’s not the plugin. It’s a WordPress theming CSS issue.

The initial problem was the generated button codes that I copied and pasted (I’ve used for two years) somehow had tons of white space above my buttons. Checking the source code in the browser revealed an additional line break for each Hidden line of the form. It was causing the same spacing issue for short codes too.

The author of the theme addressed the issue which cured the spacing issue, but for some reason it’s causing an issue with the code dealing with A3, P3, and T3.

The change from spacing issue to functioning issue came in the form of a new CSS file. Anyone have any idea how CSS would dictate how hidden form elements are handled?

Thanks for the follow-up :-)

The change from spacing issue to functioning issue came in the form of a new CSS file. Anyone have any idea how CSS would dictate how hidden form elements are handled?

I would look for any CSS files that contain selectors matching input fields that are not considering hidden input fields. If you find something like this:

input {
	.... CSS code.
}

Change it to something like this:

input:not([type='hidden'])
	{
		... CSS code.
	}

See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3445533/css-input-type-selectors-possible-to-have-an-or-or-not-syntax

I didn’t pick up on it right away. This goes beyond the hidden inputs and spacing, but I will check what you suggested. I havent’ gotten a response from the theme author yet on it, but something in the code is stripping out the closing tag of commented lines. It’s stripping out the “–>”, replacing it with –

WTH???

<!--<input type="hidden" name="amount" value="8.00" />&#8211;><br />
 <input type="hidden" name="src" value="1" /><br />
 <input type="hidden" name="srt" value="" /><br />
 <input type="hidden" name="sra" value="1" /><br />
 <!--<input type="hidden" name="a1" value="0" />&#8211;><br />
 <!--<input type="hidden" name="p1" value="0" />&#8211;><br />
 <!--<input type="hidden" name="t1" value="D" />&#8211;><br />
 <input type="hidden" name="a3" value="8.00" /><br />
 <input type="hidden" name="p3" value="1" /><br />
 <input type="hidden" name="t3" value="M" /><br />

Thanks for the follow-up :-)

If that code is coming from an s2Member Shortcode, it means that you have a theme/plugin which is not respecting the output that is generated by a Shortcode, and it’s instead applying WordPress® content filters to the output (i.e. <br /> tags for each line break in the raw code that is generated by a Shortcode).

We’ve seen this happen now and again, and it’s normally caused by a theme. Contacting the theme developer would be a good idea. Some themes will come with raw HTML shortcodes, or something like that, which can help resolve this, but in a theme-specific way. It’s not something you can reproduce on a default WP installation.

It’s doing that to the HTML code too, not just the shortcode. I had to take out the commented lines. It’s working, but it’s still causing whitespace issues. It’s added line breaks to each line of code generated for the PayPal button. At first I thought my main issue was the whitespace issue, but I quickly found out it messed with the commented lines, causing the rest of it not to work.

Odd in that the first commented line it messes with is there first line of what I copied above. There are a couple of commented lines before that it handles just fine (aside from the extra line breaks).