Entries For: 2008

GetPaid stuff updates:

• Now 520 downloads of tarballs of latest stable release (0.6.1)
• My favorite quote from the channel today:
  (06:39:57 PM) codingharrison: oh man ... I really like this code
  (06:40:03 PM) codingharrison: happy programmer :)

PayPal lands at GetPaid

Today Dennis Harrison showed up in #getpaid on a mission. He is building a store and pumping out a bunch of features for a deadline of Monday...well, part of that was to support Paypal in GetPaid. He grabbed the existing Paypal integration work, and in 28 minutes and 53 seconds,  got a (tested) working version for PayPal sandbox. Check it out on the tag in our code repository in this temporary tag.

Next is to dive into getting the IPN (Instant Payment Notification) support too (ie so you don't actually have to send someone off to paypal). Look for that starting tomorrow!

Other Payment Processor News

First, a quick note...we now have over 400 downloads of our latest release (0.6.1).

Second, Ohloh reports GetPaid as now over 15,000 lines of code!

Third, there has been a good bit of code sharing going on in the community as people are helping each other in their specific projects. Keep an eye on (or join) the mailing list if you want to learn more or partake! Adding fields on the checkout, removing fields, changing payment options and more have all been discussed recently.

And, there was a new piece of documentation written about upgrading your GetPaid and Plone. Check out http://ejahn.net/Members/eric/stories/getpaid-.6-update

Finally, we are up to 125 people on the mailing list.

Code updates:

• Discounts: the discounts product has been getting an overhaul by Lucie. Latest changes include the discount portlet (shows info on the discount). Note to 2.5 users, check the README for how to get this working in your site). The product has had some fixes and has evolved.
  
• Maurits also reported changes: The price of an item is now added to its catalog brain.  So when you have a list of brains and want to know the price of them you no longer need to do a getObject and an adapter lookup to get that price.  The price is directly in the searchResults of the portal_catalog.
  This needs a reinstall btw.  And you should rebuild the catalog afterwards to get the most benefit out of it.
• And a second from Maurits: When you make an item payable, getpaid.core fires an event.  I added an event handler to PloneGetPaid that is subscribed to that event. This makes sure that the changed item gets reindexed.  That is handy for the first change above.  And in Plone 3 there is the object_provides index for which this also helps.
• Issue 152 was fixed, thanks Lucie and Maurits for working that out. This should keep the "payable" tab happy in both Plone 3 and 2.5. 
• Chinese translation was submitted by Adam

• PloneFormGen and GetPaid integration is available in the repository at http://mercurial.intuxication.org/hg/getpaid-formgen . This product allows two ways of making a formgen form: 1) create a cart from a single page or 2) create a cart and checkout from a single page. Have a look at this product (based on the way the Salesforce.com adapter for PFG works)! It is now in at least one production site...thanks to Daniel and Horacio for making this happen!
  

• A patch to fix issue 174 has been created by Robert (Jamie) and will be added to trunk shortly. This will allow anonymous users who register as part of checkout to keep the contents of their cart.
  
• Restructuring the svn repository: now that we have a proliferation of products in the GetPaid space, releasing has become challenging with just tagging the whole bunch. Restructuring so each product has its own trunk, branches, tags will enable separate lifecycles to be in play.
  
• Eggs on pypi: finally...
• New viewlet spots on the checkout wizard to allow easy registration of information collection boxes (or whatever) in those spots, as opposed to overriding the checkout. 
• Refinement of the PloneFormGen + GetPaid integration so it plays nicely with Salesforce.com + PFG integration. Also, configurable salesforce.com integation with regular GetPaid checkout.
  

Special thanks to CalvinHP, Claytron, and ChrisW for enthusiasm for taking on the taxes in GetPaid.

At the Plone Symposium in New Orleans, we did some collaborative design of the needs and requirements for tax infrastructure. Then, on last Friday, Calvin, Clayton, and Chris busted out the infrastructure!

Calvin's update reports:

The Symposium in New Orleans was a hotbed of GetPaid collaboration. We jump started a collaborative design process for integration PloneFormGen with GetPaid based on the nifty Salesforce.com adapter for PFG. Now, a week after we left New Orleans, already work is rapidly evolving:

• SteveM added a new feature to PFG (so action adapters can fail) and the code is tested and ready to release - thanks SteveM!!
• DanielHolth and perrito666 have been furiously hacking away and sharing code in a mercurial repository.
  
• Daniel's update today:
  perrito666 and I have been developing this at a rapid pace. So far we
  have something that's addable to the form and does a little bit of
  work. My end adds 0 of all the products in a given folder into the
  cart, and then the user might update their cart to select how many of
  each they want.
• Last I saw, perrito666 was working on pre-populating the PFG folder with the required GetPaid forms.
  

GetPaid's report at Ohloh has been updated to give stats on the project. We are now up to 14,937 lines of code. Other interesting factoids:

• 3 person-years worth of code (in about a year's time)
  
• 44 contributors
• 112 people following the mailing list
• 750+ downloads of the first release (plus many users with buildout)
• Over 170 downloads of the second release (only out for 2 weeks so far)
• 4 sprints
  

Payment Express is a Visa and MasterCard certified solution, developed by DPS, which facilitates electronic payments seamlessly from multiple access points i.e. Web, EFTPOS, Billing, Interactive Voice Responce, CRM, Vending, MOTO (Mail Order / Telephone Order) and Wireless.

DPS are certified with banks in Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Singapore, South Africa, USA and United Kingdom.

The payment processor is distributed as an egg getpaid.pxpay and is available on http://pypi.python.org/pypi.

This processor plugs in to the final step of the checkout. It provides the mechanism to securely authorize payment offsite.

See: http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/source/browse/trunk/getpaid.pxpay/src/getpaid/pxpay/README.txt for more help/discussion.

Thanks to Matt Halstead for integrating this and Darryl Dixon for kicking off the development!

For those joining the Plone Symposium in New Orleans this week, I will be giving a talk on "Social Sourcing" tomorrow (Wed) at 3pm.

Social sourcing is the participative organizing model with an entrepreneurial backbone, an established role for non-developers, and an ongoing process to make open source software projects sustainable that we used to organize the GetPaid project. Check out the notes and video from the social sourcing talk in Naples. This talk should include some updates (including from the questions in Naples and taking into account the Plone Strategic Planning Summit).

A while ago, we created the release branch for GetPaid's second major release, 0.6. However, we didn't officially release it (with packaged code etc), and in the meantime, several fixes and changes came in. So, we are now releasing 2 versions.

0.6.0: This is the originally branched code. Works well and preserves "backwards" compatibility for those using customized GetPaid code.

0.6.1: This is a final release. Includes API refactoring and unicode fixes. May break your customized GetPaid code but not too much :)

Both of these work on Plone 2.5 and 3.0, and apparently on Plone 3.1 also (though we currently aren't providing a buildout for 3.1).

To check out the changelogs, see http://groups.google.com/group/getpaid-changes 

Ain't integration fun!? We hope so... Lots of talk recently about integration GetPaid with PloneFormGen (for flexible forms leading into transactions) and Salesforce.com (to write transaction data into the CRM). These have long been areas of interest in the community, and I wanted to point out a couple threads of conversation going on around these (yes, I have been instigating some discussion again...).

PloneFormGen + GetPaid = single page checkout

At least, we hope! Ever since the first release of getpaid, we realized that a flexible  donation/payment form making option was desired for GetPaid. We know that everyone wants their donation form slightly different, so an option like
PloneFormGen, which also has wide adoption in the community, seemed like  an obvious choice.

One/Northwest and others have worked on an adapter for mapping PFG data into salesfoce.com, which seems like a great model for this use case. This leverages the flexible form making and integrates it into another system for storing/manipulating what was collected in the form - brilliant! For more on
this, see this blog post.

The concept would be similar for Getpaid integration with PFG: map fields from a form into GetPaid cart and/or checkout process. Some potential use  cases:
  - Make a single page checkout (so you enter all on one page and that generates the order directly)
  - Ordering multiple items from a single page

See an example of both of these at: http://tinyurl.com/53yr8o

See and contribute to thread here.

Salesforce + GetPaid = tracking those customers

See and contribute to thread here

And one day...maybe there will be a GetPaid + PloneFormGen + Salesforce.com integration! Oh the bliss!!

We would  appreciate your ideas, feedback, questions, and offers to contribute :)