News

Throughout the history of GetPaid, there have been several people interested in multiple currencies in GetPaid.  I was excited to hear from Jean-François Roche of Affinitic today about his progress in getting multiple currencies working in the context of GetPaid. I found out that he already has some useful use cases working and is waiting to get them in production to be able to merge them back into GetPaid.

Code monkeys can check out the latest in an svn repo. For those of us who prefer English explanations...a brief summary of what I learned about the work:

• The work grew out of the need to manage currency based on the country of the buyer
• The UI gets the price from the buyer at first entrance in the shop and then a utility that manages policies for the link between the country and currency picks which price to show.
  
• Each country defined in the policies then has a separate price
  

As of earlier today, we had 258 tests passing on 2 versions of Plone (2.5 and 3.0) - yippeee!

So, with much joy, we are moving the trunk to the 0.6 branch for this release.

Next we will tag a 0.6.0 release candidate.

This release got a new directory of documentation as well as a lot of work on new features for shipping, fulfillment and reporting. Have a look at the latest buildout!

Ricardo has been helping us to clean up issues and we are down to 10 listed in the tracker, with several of those actually falling into the "continuous enhancement" category, as opposed to blockers or priority items for this release.

Here's a quick look at progress towards the 0.6 release and an update on the release.

• We are over 620 downloads of the 0.3 release tarball! (plus buildout usage)
• A bug got fixed in the 0.3 buildout branch this past week
• Several bugs got fixed in the trunk, including restored Plone 2.5 compatibility for the buildout, report-related bugs, template changes, and more.  Also, a tool got added to extract email addresses from customer records. Check out the change logs to see more.
  
• We are down to 14 issues tagged for M2 (actually less once we verify closure...). See the issues and grab one to fix or test!
  
• The 0.6 release branch will be made later this week. If you have goodies to include or bugs to fix, please do them asap!
  

Thanks for tuning in. Grab an issue, test the tools, and let us know how it looks so we can make way for 0.6 :)

GetPaid's second major release, this one provides complete fulfillment and shipping functionality as well as several enhancements to the base product, such as address book, warehouse and inventory management, reports, and UPS shipping calculator integration. This version supports Plone 2.5 and Plone 3.0. Hopefully it will also get the Discount product included as well.

Where are we today?

Lots of changes have been going on (see the older blog posts for a summary) and great new features, especially around fulfillment and shipping.  Basically, to the solid framework established in the Red Ochre release (0.3), we have built out fulfillment functionality quite extensively.

Ohloh reports us as having over 10,000 lines of code now!

What next?

Next week, probably, we will make our release branch of the code. There will be some complexity around making tarballs that work, so expect them a while later.

We still have several issues that are targeted at this release.

We also need a catchy code name for this release :)

One thing to note...this will be our last release supporting Plone 2.5, unless someone new steps up to do the maintenance on that part of the code. The future release (0.9) will probably be lots of cleaning and UI improvements, plus the new features people think up to include :)

What a busy month! I think I have missed about 150 revisions since the last update, so here goes an attempt to catch up...to get the latest, grab our buildout (see documentation here).

Some stats:

• Over 500 downloads of our last stable release!
• A good number of tests going into new products!
• There are now LOTS of open issues (68, actually) in the tracker, which includes lots of change/improvement requests also. If you want to help out please take 'em on!
  

Highlights of what is in the latest code now:

• UPS shipping support. Still don't quite understand it (some configuration magic that has to happen), but there has been a LOT of work to get this going. Thanks to Kapil, Liam, Perrito and others for working, reworking, and fixing this.
  
• Shipping setup: this got refactored to be a bit cleaner and have some nice viewlets. Makes it easy to add in multiple shipping methods as we grow.
  
• Inventory management: Yes!!! getpaid.warehouse now available. This is a rather recent addition (you can only find it now by adding @@inventory to the URL), but it is there! Checkouts change the quantity, there is the ability to add warehouses for a site. More goodies to come as the work is rounded out by Kapil. Nicely done!
• Address book: Thanks to a use case we had for an ifPeople client, we built a means of saving shipping addresses in your profile during checkout, which are then accessible in checkout.
  
• Auto-loading your details: get tired of typing same details into the screen? Now they get autoloaded! Go lazy programmers!!
• Order templates: reordering your viagra supply ever couple months? Now you can save time in checkout by loading your orders from your past orders!
• Shipping price wired into total price: Now when you select shipping service, it will be added to the total price in the cart/checkout. 
• SSL: Now, by default, the site wants SSL. If you are just testing, you need to deactivate this in the GetPaid setup area for checkout to work. 
• Checkout wizard refactoring: after a significant refactoring, it got some fixes and improvements and additional testing.
  
• Relational database: there is also a relational database implementation of getpaid.core (called getpaid.rdb).
  

• PayPal processor interface!!! No really...I am serious! daMaestro told me in #getpaid just now :)
• PXPay processor: The Kiwis finally have their chance at GetPaid too! Apparently Winterhouse Consulting has done an implementation of this pay processor from Payment Express.
  
• Authorize.net recurring payments: ifPeople has also done integration with of the Automatic Recurring Billing (ARB) service of authorize.net. Currently in a branch...
• A new release: no details...but probably will be associated with a shipping wrap up. Possibly in late April.
  
• More sites using GetPaid!

At last I am getting around to updating some GetPaid news...over a month since the last posting. It has been way-busy in GetPaid land and for me personally, so here come hopefully a few updates.

Most exciting for me, is to see sites launch that are using GetPaid, especially when those sites also result in contributions to the product. Just recently, we had two of those:

• Trees for Life: TFL is actually a sponsor of the GetPaid Red Ochre release and we are very greatful for their contribution. Their site just launched with a donation/catalog management powered by GetPaid on a Plone 2.5 site. The site includes some custom email notifications and also a donation "add on" to your cart. Check out the site at www.TreesForLife.org .
  

• African Books Collective: African Books Collective is a non-profit organization of African publishers whose site uses GetPaid to power its book sales. The site, developed by the Ely Technology Group, is built on Plone 3 and uses Google Checkout. Thanks for adding a new processor to the mix! Visit the site: www.africanbookscollective.com

Non-code news

• First thing to mention is that we passed 400 downloads of the release candidate tarball! We have no way of knowing how many people are on buildout, but that adds to the growing number of users.
• Speaking of buildout...it's worth mentioning that there is now a handy tool/bundle to help Windows users get going with buildout! You can read about the "installer for buildout-ready Windows" here. Haven't used it, but glad to know that the windows users are getting exposed to more buildout goodness :)
• Google code added a sweet trac-ish-on-ajax code browser. Check out GetPaid's code here. 
• Anyone going to Plone Symposium East? There is still time to submit a proposal for a session on GetPaid (though that ends this Friday)! If you are interested, check it out.
  

Sprints

• There was mention of interest of GetPaid for the Sorrento sprint. If you are looking to hang out with great folks in lovely place, check out Sorrento sprint!
  
• There was even mention of a potential DocComm II sprint for this summer at Google again!
  

If you are interesting in organizing or leading GetPaid sprint activities, please do! Please also share your interest with others on our mailing list.

Code and related

• Big news lately was the merge of work done in a branch into the trunk. This brought in UPS integration, a backend for address books, and a refactored checkout wizard.
  
• Since the merge, several fixes and modifications have happened including, and there have been several points where the buildout was not in ideal condition, but things are looking up:
• Making xml dependency more sane: the buildout got a bit unwieldy with a dependency on lxml. Liam refactored that out (I believe it is just going to use elementtree). Several folks in the channel today agreed that we need to avoid making the buildout more difficult as a point of distribution. We want people using GetPaid...not fighting with the tool. 
• Javier and Perrito fixed compatibility of the new checkout wizard with Plone 2.5 after finding a problem with an import of IBrowserView failing
• Dunny did some externals cleanup on the anonymous buildout and Kapil updated the anonymous buildout also. This brings the anon buildout up to date with the merge and changes in the development version.
  
• Kapil made several modifications to the checkout wizard and its state handling.
• There is also a lot of stuff planned and at various stages of being worked on:
• UPS UI integration is well advanced. Please have a look, especially if you are able to help out.
  
• Inventory/warehouse management: Ability to turn this on for a product and site. Keep track of where your stuff is as well as how much of it you have.
  
• Reporting and storage of orders in relational database: Work is planned on storing orders in a relational (postgres) db and then providing new reports.
  
• Liam also reports that shipping using USPS (that's US Postal Service for those not in the US) will be easy building on the UPS integration module.
  
• UI refactoring: after some deployments, there is some frustration with UI and skinning GetPaid that can be overcome with a bit of UI love...
  
• Probably more goodies too...but I'll leave it at that for now :)

There has been a lot of work going on a branch called "kapil-dev", which includes shipping with UPS, an address book available in checkout, and a checkout wizard refactoring. Two main changes:

• the store settings are no longer stored in an adapter,  instead there in a utility. It's backwards compatible though for access, ie there is an adapter that retrieves the utility. and there is a migration step in place if you go the upgrade tool. Previous settings will work till then.
• the checkout wizard has been refactored in an attempt to make it more customizable. which is in getpaid.wizard. There are separate controllers (sequence of steps ), data managers ( manage all the data in the forms) and steps no longer have to get hardcoded to their order of execution. If you have made programmatic changes to the wizard, you will need to make changes to accomodate the new code. If you override the checkout entirely with your customizations, your changes should be fine.
  

These changes represent some great new features for GetPaid, yet also mean that the code base is going to change in some significant pieces...so there is going to be a transition that requires attention (note: this is vital for anyone running their site from buildout on the trunk of the product; if you are using the tarball or the RedOchre release branch (0.3), then you don't need to pay attention to this). 

If you are running off the trunk, then the next time you update the code base, you will need to perform a migration to fix some of the changes. The "upgrade" screen in GetPaid setup area will be helpful in this - just hit the upgrade button and your site will be fixed!

Check out...

• GetPaid dev list now available via Gmane! For those of you who like your mailing lists in an exciting text format ;), you can now find our development mailing list available via Gmane: http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.zope.plone.getpaid.devel  Thanks to Suno (meandtheshell) for setting that up!
• Buildout updated to use latest Plone 3: now you get a shiny new version of Plone 3.0.5 (or whatever the latest Plone is) when you run buildout. This is also true in the anonymous buildout.
  

In the works

• Taxes! Yes, there is a needs for (US) tax handling. So yesterday kicked off a big discussion on implementation handling. Are you interested in having a say on taxes too? Please join our development mailing list and let others know! Shortly there will be user stories on this. More developers desired to contribute!
  
• Shipping, checkout refactoring, and persistent address book: All in place on Kapil's branch, he is planning to circulate a writeup about the changes and request review (though take a look now if you want the sneak peak!).
  

Coming soon

• Inventory and warehouse management: need to keep track of stock on items in your store? Track which warehouse a product is in and where in there it is? This work should be getting underway next week. Check out the user story on inventory/warehouse management.
  

Product stats:

• Exactly 350 downloads of our RedOchre 0.3 RC!