Entries For: October 2007

Not being a developer, I am continuously amazed at the activity that goes into GetPaid, as it is all of you that make the project tick! Since registering the project at Ohloh, I have been even more entertained to watch the stats associated with us. For example, I have made a paltry 14 commits to the code base...In total we have 29 contributors to the project. The recent release-related super-star is Maurits van Rees, who has made 45 commits in the last month and give GetPaid its Plone 3.0 compatibility, along with some testing rigor. THANK YOU!!!

Rev 1000 also brings us steps closer to our Red Ochre Release. Kapil hit the 1,000 mark today with the fix to a Five initid bug, which provides us greater database stability. Now we are polishing, and closing issues leading up to the release. Got a second to test? Try the buildout or download the latest tarball.

We are still in the process of reviewing, evaluating, and issue tracking, so if you are poised on your seat, jump in now and get involved! Our mailing list is a great way to reach us, and spark a conversation, learn from others, or just say hello :)

And our apologies to the planet readers for sending such ugly html :(

But now, it's fixed!

For the information of other quills users...the problem was pointing to the atom
feed, as opposed to the rss feed. Why that matters, I still don't know :)

Ohloh was created to provide more visibility into the open source development process and to help connect those involved in open source projects. By registering our project on the site, the site downloads and studies the software, determining the lines of code and metrics about committers, comments, and more.

And now we know...

Well, the first thing Ohloh tells us, we already know: "Large, active development team" and that it is mostly written in Python. Ok, maybe not too insightful for us yet...but hopefully soon we can see committers on the little Google world map!

At the moment, it has online analyzed getpaid.core, so still waiting for two other elements to get sucked into the process...

Help build awareness

Please check out the listing for GetPaid: http://www.ohloh.net/projects/9356?p=GetPaid

Also, please rate the project! Your comments will help others learn about how cool the project is :)

Also check out

Plone's listing

Plone Collective's listing

Zope 3's listing

Zope's listing

Building on the strong basis of near-Release Candidate code for GetPaid on Plone 2.5, Maurits made some changes to ensure Plone 3.0 compatibility. Now GetPaid is running on 3.0 and 2.5 without a branch!

Summary of work (taken from Maurits's notes):

• There is a buildout for getpaid on Plone 3.0 https://getpaid.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/getpaid-30.buildout
  
• The getpaid product (PloneGetPaid) and packages (getpaid.core and hurry.workflow) have gotten compatibility fixes on trunk.  So no branches needed for now.
  
• All unit tests pass on 2.5 and 3.0.
  
• There are test failures for Products.PloneGetPaid on both 2.5 and 3.0.
  
• Compared with one week ago, Five was moved from develop-products/Five to parts/five/Five and all keeps working fine.

We have been plugging away in Naples and now at the end of our sprint.

We got good progress today, but the list kept growing even as we got things done. We mostly focused on tests, and also got some minor improvements in the system. Today included UI, issues, translations, and functional and unit tests. More tests needed, as we didn't know how all the pieces were supposed to function (ie not tested).

Would be great to have people start testing and file issues if you find anything (http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/issues/list ). I suspect a RC tarball will be available late this week or early next week.

Status:

• Content catalog work nearly done. One test still failing, so Jean is branching getpaid.core to continue working on it (with Kapil).
• Functional tests from yesterday and the checkout ones made today are now failing in one place. So we had to do some
• Cart and cart portlet tweaked to show number of total items (as opposed to number of types of items, ie 2 shoes and 4 hats = 6 items vs 2).
• plonegetpaid.com updated with information about Red Ochre release
• Issue 124 is fixed, though ideally it still needs to write the error to the exception log for reference
• A German translation got committed.
• You can see the two earlier updates here: http://plonegetpaid.com/updates/archive/2007/10/
  

Things on the list not yet done:

• testing the new features manually (duplicate processing protection, mail notification fix)
• documentation on making a payment processor and development practices/conventions
• migrating more documentation from the wiki to plone.org
• document dev conventions: update and run tests before commit. capitalizations.

Thanks for your support and following the project. Thanks especially to Jean, John, Ricardo, Florino, Reed, Andreas, Davide, and Guissepe. And especially thanks to Kapil, whose engineering has been a great way to interest and involve more developers, and who has done so much of the product we have today.

Overall, sprinter numbers are way down today as many people head home, but GetPaid sprint is still with seven people. At this point in the day, we are the largest sprinting group...

We are now over 900 commits in the repository (912, at this moment)!

Today we discovered some important features that were running without tests, so more testing has been added to the getpaid.core in the order and buyable catalog thanks to Jean Francois. Additionally, we finished off two important issues, thanks to Florian and Ricardo. We also got a new means of protecting the user from duplicate transactions working (we are requesting review and testing of this) thanks to John. Additionally I updated information on plone.org about the product and started updating the home page with release info, including the list of features. We also got a German translation thanks to Andreas. As you can see on the side, we also got a release icon! Thanks to Luke Aune for help on that one.

The order manager is currently being refactored to handle cataloging the products (for use in backups). The checkout wizard is in the process of having functional browser tests implemented. The UI is getting cleaned up some (titles on admin pages, including making additional skinning possible (so elements of PloneGetPaid inherit your site's styles).

Naples Sprint

There's over a hundred people in the Naples Sprint, post Plone Conference. There are lots of topics and projects going on here. GetPaid's goal for this sprint is to get out a release candidate of the Red Ochre release.

GetPaid: Day 1

On the first day, we recruited a group of 8 to work on the project. We reviewed our task list and refined it some. Before delving into refactoring, we discovered that our product tests were in need of serious attention. Though work has gone on recently in building in tests in the getpaid.core (Zope 3 library) - in part to make to easier to upgrade to Plone 3.0 - the PloneGetPaid (Plone wrapper product) was desperately needing improvement. Some tests created during the Google sprint were completely outdated and needed removal, and large sections of the product needed tests. This quickly became a priority for considering a release. Reed also cleaned up some of the naming in the product to make it more consistent.

In this process, Jean Francois introduced a product into the buildout for making functional tests called Test Recorder. It allowed me (read "not a developer") to make functional doctests for the product! That was exciting, as I had no idea it could be so easy (ie literally just clicking through the site and adding some comments).

We also updating the Plone version to the latest release in the series (2.5.4) and updated the Five version to 1.4 to allow for browsertesting.

Davide also worked on getting us onto GenericSetup best practices. Things were removed from the install.py and cleaned up for GenericSetup.

Davide also made an example customization policy to ship with the product to demonstrate how to change settings. This complements the Zope 3 approach to customization discussed in documentation and in Martin's talk from the conference.

A small bug in the policy display was fixed.

Liam, sprinting remotely, also checked in several UPS integration files to the branch he is working on, which included tests.

On the internationalization front, Ricardo added a Portuguese (Portugal) translation, Giuseppe updated the Italian translation.

That's about it for day one! Looks better when I actually write it all down :)

Day 2

We are already under way for the day. Unit tests in PloneGetPaid are getting advanced, and the GenericSetup work is completed already!

More later...

Thanks to Maurits for summarizing the talk on his blog here.

To download the presentation by John Lenton, please click here.

EasyShop is in the Plone collective and on a live site already.

EasyShop: A Plone 2.5 (with branch in 3.0) product for ecommerce store is already released as alpha and running live. The product includes archetypes for all content and Zope 3 interfaces, adapters, and views. It is in the process of being refactored for Plone 3.0. It is focused on stores (European), with ability to configure flexibly criteria for pricing, shipping, and taxes. Credit card payment is via PayPal and it also allows for manual processing (ie offline), with ability for the store manager to control the order workflow.

Browse the code in the collective

Visit the product on Plone.org

See the demo site

Description from the Plone Commerce Background page:

Social Sourcing Talk

The GetPaid project was organized differently than your average free software project. For one, we raised money for it. Additionally, we had an integrated design process that involved non-developers from the beginning. In the talk, I introduce the social sourcing model we used and why this was an important process for making the best product possible. I explained the process by telling the GetPaid story.  *New* Watch the video at plone.tv

Basic outline of the process:

Definition: An organizing approach that gets diverse stakeholders to participate to the software making process.

Outline of Social Sourcing, v1.0 Alpha ;)

• Study the market (benchmark)
• Put together a compelling plan
• Recruit the right people
• Engage a wide base in refining requirements
• Ask for money
• Celebrate successes
• Sustain it: fun, organization, motivation
• Regroup, review, and restart...

It's exciting to be moving towards the end of this process in GetPaid. After the conference, we go into a Release Candidate sprint...but we are definitely eyeing the review, regroup, and restart step!

You can get the full presentation here

The presentation was recorded and should be available at plone.org within about a month. Note also though that some sessions are being streamed live at http://ploneconf.comlounge.tv/
Technorati Profile

Questions for Plone

Part of my presentation was to ask questions about the processes for organizing and desiging Plone, in light of the social sourcing model. In particular, how can Plone be more inclusive to non-developers in defining it's directions and features? Perhaps Plone could benefit from process improvements that would:

• Clarify direction and identity
• Provide more inclusive design process
• Improve the overall product
• Strengthen Plone community
  

In particular: how is the vision for the future defined? Is that a transparent and open process? Where is it documented? Also, why is there nothing between the vision and a PLIP that would enable non-developers to participate? (This last one came out of my frustration at not being able to create a PLIP to introduce some search UI improvements we had made to Plone core, since, as per policy on plone.org, only core developers can make PLIPs).

Just as I was getting into this, "someone who knows" informed us of imminent announcements that will address this issue. I suppose that means that at the Plone Foundation meeting tonight! So look for some more news :)

Questions for GetPaid

Jon Stahl, our NGO liason and ongoing project supporter, made a great question: what does GetPaid need to keep the process going? Not something I had prepared for, so I made a few notes here in addition to what I responded:

• Deployments! We need more deployments, and in particular, practical applications of GetPaid that lead to more options being available in the product (ie for payment processors, workflows, configurations, interfaces, etc).
• More organizers! The project is likely to have teams oriented around specific extensions to the product (membership, event registration, advanced store functionality). The organizers would basically focus on new rounds of social sourced development.
• More committed developers! Though for the first release, we relied on Kapil's work establishing GetPaid as a framework. Going forward, we need more people involved as developers to architecture as well as features.
• UI love! Usability on the system can be greatly improved and we welcome contributions to this.
• Screencasts!...for documentation and marketing.
• Organizing new round of features: questions from the audience helped get my brain off the narrow focus on getting a release to see the next round of features that need to be considered. I will be writing up some notes on this work.

Well, that's a good first start, I think, but will definitely continue to consider what we need (especially after we get to reflect on a release).