Entries For: May 2007

For your planning:

• Next week we will be ready for alpha testers! (and you should be able to
  complete a checkout)
  
• In two weeks (June 6), we will have a followup call to talk about the
  testing, new development, and planning for Google sprint (same time as
  today's call).
  

Also, don't forget that we are in the process of our Red Ochre release
fundraising! Please check out www.plonegetpaid.com/sponsor to make a
contribution!

Check out the updates below. If you have any questions, please ask!

Cheers,
Chris
--
GetPaid Dev Update Call
May 23, 2007

Attendees: Alex (aclark), Kapil (hazmat), Richard (fifer), Scott (spaleyAE),
Jon (jonstahl), Chris (cjj)

Update:

Develoment is in a rapid pace of change now

Infrastructure over last week

• marking content as "payable" and being able to edit amount
• shopping cart that you can add things to (all viewlet based)
• integration of ore.member for adding fields to member

Next:

• Order management facility (in process), track orders and payment process info
• Pay processor integration (troubles getting authorize.net dev account; Scott and Kapil to connect about that)
• zope 3 workflow engine being used for checkout

By next week should have ability to complete checkout process.
Next week we will need alpha testers!

Then: Support for users to look at orders

Goals:

• Will be able to store all ecommerce data in relational db (to make it

easier for reporting systems tie in). Because of this, the bundle includes
some things for testing that won't be part of the first release.

Q/A:

• Scott asks about donation management (forms to make donation in predetermined amounts for a given program/sub-organization). Would need to set dropdown of prices, ideally, and possibly have open field for price also.
• Other use cases: workflow change on payment will be deferred till Google sprint.
• Delivery through the web use case has several complexities around changing
  security settings on an object and has been deferred for now. 
• SSL use in commerce systems is ubiquitous. Though we can't necessarily
  enforce it in the product, we should explain (or link to doc on plone.org)
  it in master README; perhaps we need to configure SSL in admin screens.
  
• Trust Commerce (payment processor) product published by Tres (link from
  the payment processors page in the wiki).
  

Show me the code!

This past week, Kapil took on GetPaid head on and has been making great progress  towards the Red Ochre release! An excerpt:

 from the admin screens you can now activate content types to
 be available as buyable, shippable. the admin pages have also
 switched out to a set of tabbed views from a single view.

 from within the plone ui navigation, for content types configured
 for it within the admin screens, you can enable an individual
 piece of content to be one purchasble, and edit its purchase settings.

Read complete update email. The latest also includes work on the shopping cart. If you want to grab the code and check it out, check out the easy process thanks to the use of zc.building! The Getting Start doc explains it all.

For those of you anxious for the latest news, we will have a conference call this Wednesday, May 23 at 1pm Eastern for an update on the product's development. Please join us! Dial in to 605-725-3600 with access code 69812 .

Social Source Fundraising

We realize that commerce is a serious need in Plone's toolkit. We have all been waiting for it to just “emerge” from the community, but unfortunately, it hasn't yet. So...we decided to fast-track that by going beyond the volunteer efforts at sprints to actually fund development. Just as Open Source relies on a group of individuals to contribute to the whole, our “social source” funding model relies on individuals, organizations, and businesses in the community to contribute the pieces that make funding possible.

You can see to the right our ChipIn widget on the fundraising. Our “Red Ochre” Release has a cost of $7,500, of which we have secured $4,500 from sponsors already. Now we are pursuing more community contributions to raise the remaining funds. If you would like to be a sponsor or make a contribution, please check out our Sponsorship page. Thanks to Jon Stahl for getting out our fundraising letter to Plone users list.

Sponsors include:

• ifPeople
• Object Realms
• One/Northwest
• Contextual Corporation
• Totsie.com

Red Ochre Release Scheduled for June 1

The first release of our product, GetPaid, will happen June 1, 2007. This represents a lot of work to get the architecture down and workable. The initial product will be able to make content payable and process a payment (using the Authorize.net processor). This release will include:

• Administrative screens
• Quick Install
  
• Setup of pay processor (a tab in product interface)
  
• "Payable" content
  
• Ability to make any content payable
• Donations handling (form to take donations)
• Example of pay processing content workflow integration
  
• Payment processor
  
• Authorize.net pay processor integration
  
• A shopping cart
• Checkout
  
• Registration/authentication 

Sponsors Needed

GetPaid is a well-organized project seeking to provide reliable, useful releases. Rather than relying on all volunteers, we are funding the development of this open source product to ensure that it moves along successfully. We offer many options for sponsorship, but any and all contributions are welcome! If you want to make a contribution, please see information about sponsorship and how to make a contribution.

If you have any quesitons, please contact us.

What does the release name mean?

"Red Ochre" is the nickname for this release. Red Ochre was chosen because it is one of the earliest forms of money used (see wikipedia info), approximately 100,000 years ago. Since this is our first release, we are emerging. We chose the early symbol of money to relate to this release.

There is an important Plone sprint coming up and the community is seeking sponsors (great perks! [1]) and sprinters (in person and remote) for the "doccom" sprint, June 25-29. The site will be at Google's headquarters in California. There are two topics:

• Documentation (to ensure that Plone 3.0 is released with full documentation), and
  
• Commerce, to achieve a new version of the product GetPaid that makes payment processing and commerce simple and flexible in Plone. [2]
  

Regarding documentation, this is something that benefits everyone! As you know, Plone has been changing very fast, and the pending release of Plone 3.0 represents a radical shift in the technology and how people will develop for it. Documentation is needed now more than ever. Please consider supporting the sprint either financially [3] or with your participation.

For more on the sprint, please check out: http://plone.org/events/sprints/doc-ecommerce

You can see a list of interested attendees (and sign up!) at http://www.openplans.org/projects/doc-and-e-commerce-sprint/interested-attendees

Hope to see you online or at Googleplex!

[1] Sponsor levels include free training! PloneBootCamps and the intro trainings from 7TechNorthwest. See
http://plone.org/events/sprints/doc-ecommerce for the full breakdown.
[2] Plone commerce has a long and painful history, which we are trying to change with a product called GetPaid (and PloneGetPaid), which leverages Zope3 technologies and will be useful in Plone 2.5. This product was begun at the BBQSprint and has its first release scheduled for June 1, and second release after the doccom sprint. 
[3] Financial support makes sure the great sprinters have food, shelter, and fun during the time they spend helping make the Plone community stronger (and btw, they are donating their time...).