Entries For: 2008

Thanks to Jim Nelson from Net Easy for stepping up to advance the PayPal integration for GetPaid, things have been moving quickly over the last couple weeks. For those who have been in the #getpaid channel, you have seen this unfolding and a lot of help from the community in discussing, lending a hand, or just consoling!

This morning, Jim (aka james4765) reported:

(09:19:11 AM) james4765: got the first complete round-trip transaction working!
(09:20:04 AM) james4765: add item to cart, go tp paypal, pay, return to site, process IPN, complete order finance workflow
(09:20:31 AM) james4765: rough edges to knock off, though

Congrats, Jim!

You can check out the code in the getpaid.paypal product

This month's Python Magazine has a nice surprise for us: GetPaid all over the cover! Horacio (aka perrito666), who presented GetPaid at a free software conference in Argentina not too long ago also wrote an article which appears in this month's edition of Python Magazine and is featured prominently on the cover.

Building E-commerce on Plone with GetPaid, by Horacio Durán

E-commerce sites are easier to build than you think, especially using Plone and GetPaid. From small non-governmental organizations to independent professionals, many current Plone users would profit greatly from adding e-commerce abilities to their online presence. The task has been beyond the grasp of many otherwise competent website owners because of the complexity of the available solutions. No more: GetPaid can easily convert any Plone site into a complete e-commerce solution.

Read more about this month's edition and purchase it online at http://pymag.phparch.com/c/issue/view/85 (sadly, we don't get any referral benefit...maybe the magazine will cut us a slice of their earnings ;).

Happy World Plone Day! It is a day of a lot of activity across the planet for Plone. It is also the week before the Bolzano sprint in Italy!

Recently, Bruno from Abstract Solutions posted information about taking on GetPaid as a topic during the sprint. The Abstract folks must have had fun in DC at the Plone Conference sprint on GetPaid and are coming back for more!

We are glad they are taking an active role on making GetPaid better and making GetPaid's second sprint in Italy happen! If you are headed to Bolzano, we hope you will join up with Bruno and others. We also may have some remote sprinting going on, so jiump on #getpaid to find us during the Bolzano Sprint, Nov 11-13!

Several fixes have gone into a minor release of GetPaid that is now available in both a tag in SVN and a bundled product for download. This includes a fix to ensure it works on Plone 3.1.5+, a fix to the pagination of orders management, and other small changes. No significant feature changes from the original 0.6 branch, but this is now the recommended version.

• You can download it here: http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/downloads/list
  
• Find it in svn here: https://getpaid.googlecode.com/svn/tags/0.6.2
  
• Or read more about GetPaid here: www.PloneGetPaid.com
  

Following the conference and the talk on GetPaid that got some new people interested in the product, we launched into yet another GetPaid sprint. Conference sprints are great about getting new people involed as well as connecting those in the community. At this sprint, we had 2 people who had been working on GetPaid, Ken (from Contextual Corp, and a sponsor of GetPaid) and Adam (a local to the conference who I got to meet for the first time), and 4 people who were new, including 3 Italians from Abstract (Bruno and Antonio added their names to the checkin roster during the sprint!) and Lee (who shared his PayPal knowledge). What follows is a Sprint report-out of what our small band was able to accomplish (an alternative to this narrative presentation is the list that Ken composed: http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/wiki/PloneConf2008DCSprint ).

On Saturday (see day one crew), we battled network issues to get everyone set up with a buildout. Luckily, it eventually worked (after over 2 hours). In the process, we verified that the recipe created by Lucie works (yeah!!!), making it very easy to drop GetPaid into an existing buildout. We also created a new .cfg file for those wanting to peg their version of Plone with 3.1.6 (the latest release), adding to the buildout configurations for Plone 2.5 and 3.0 that already exist. Even better, the documentation for how to get started was updated with this new info (http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/wiki/DevGettingStarted ).

With the work on Plone 3.1.6, we found a test that was failing (though for a rather silly reason that had nothing to do with GetPaid) and Ken and Adam went about fixing that (rev2064).

Antonio and Bruno went after issues in the tracker with a vengence. Antonio paired with Ken to take on an issue to take out the mystery in matching orders in GetPaid and your payment processor (issue #116). They succeeded to persist processor transaction id and last-4 digits of credit card to ZODB. Also, modified order-summary.pt to present these two fields (rev2072-2074). Bruno also took out #151, which makes it easier to set up GetPaid (more intuitive default settings), added missing Italian translations, and fixed the dist.plone.org links. Adam took on an issue of making the checkout wizard configurable and also created a Howto on adding an administrative screen in GetPaid (something formerly rather mysterious). He added a starting page for making features in the checkout configurable (rev2083 ) and a Howto. 

While they sprinted, I worked on updating the internationalization files in GetPaid. Since it has been a while since they were updated, several new ids for tranlation had been introduced (over 100) and all the language files needed these sync'ed so the translations could be added. It was a bit of a mystery on doing this, but with Hanno's help, I was able to get through it. In the process, I discovered some issues with how one of the three domains we use and so couldn't complete the updating (we need to fix the domain tags first)

Sunday was also a bit of a payment processor sprint (see the brain trust). Payment processors are many and varied and most people using GetPaid will at least consider implementing their own, either for existing bank preferences or need for something in their own country. We had Alex (from Finland) and Ken and Lee (both with interest in PayPal) going over the interfaces and examining the APIs. The work on PayPal led to clarification about a few changes needed to get the off-site payment working.

If you want a more detailed view of the changelog, check out:
- Google code's changelog: http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/source/list
- Or the list subscribed to the changes: http://groups.google.com/group/getpaid-changes

As typical, a slightly slow start to the sprint post-very-fun-last-night-of-conference. But by midday, we had momentum (yeah...it took us 2 hours to get buildouts running due to either connectivity issues or everyone crushing the distribution points for the plone code). We had a strong showing from the Abstract guys, who dove in to fixing stuff right away! We also had Adam, a long-time irc channel companion and local and Ken Wasetis, one of the sponsors of the first release of GetPaid.

Here's a quick update of what we did on Day 1:

We all got buildouts set up (except me) - 3 ways were tried (2 worked): trunk, recipe, and meteoroid branch (later didn't work yet).
Fixed the 1 failing test in Plone 3.1
Test and verify GetPaid recipe works in Plone 3.1(.6) site
getpaid.core i18n files updated; Italian translation finished; Dutch done

Testing bugs/issues in tracker: started with 73 issues, we will probably be several less by the end of the sprint!
  A critcal bug ended up not being reproducable: 209
  Testing processor gets default value (improves usability)
  Strategized and dove into a high priority issue to provide more order info: 116 
  Started issue 214
  Starting creating Checkout Options as part of issue 184

Sunday (tomorrow):

- Update pay processor order.py to get order id back from processor ==> authnet
- pay processor integration sprint (work on 2 or 3 potential processors)
- documentation update

Just in time for the Plone Conference sprint, our Remote Sprint Goddess, Lucie, finished a release recipe for GetPaid, making it much easier for you to include GetPaid in your own recipe. Please give her your thanks and pat on the back!

More from Lucie:

The recipe is working and uploaded on pypi:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/getpaid.recipe.release/1.0

You have all the detail on how to use it if you follow the link above. I will probably continue updating it today and make the documentation
prettier. I am currectly using it for one of our sites and seems to work correctly so far.

Well, just in time production (thanks to perrito and dunny), I had the various "howto's" I needed to explain how to use GetPaid for the talk.

In the talk, I introduce GetPaid and its core features, and then show how it can be used to satisfy various use cases, both with the out-of-the-box components as well as with some customization.

The audience was a decent size (especially considering I was up against Joel Burton at same time slot!),

Download slides here.

http://plonegetpaid.com/updates/files/getpaid-presentation-ploneconf-2008.pdf

Surveying the State of the Art in Plone Ecommerce

I intended my talk for the conference to be a good learning experience that pushed my own understanding of GetPaid. As I am not a developer, I certainly don't know how to do a lot of things that people do with GetPaid. But, as GetPaid was my motive for actually learning how to use svn and making my first checkin, I figure I should be able to figure some of this stuff out using the available documentation and my knowledge of GetPaid. So as part of my talk, which will be walking through what you can do with GetPaid: out of the box, with community addons and with basic customziations, I have been asking a lot of questions! This has motivated some new documentation being produced that will continue to support new community members who are finding GetPaid. Also, I found a few bugs that are now in our tracker.

Some of the things I will show:

• Managing inventory with GetPaid
• One-page checkout (with PloneFormGen integration)
• Making a store

• Pay-to-publish content (working that integrates a payment step for job listings, ads, applications, etc)
• Making your own content type buyable (programmatically)
• Showing GetPaid information on your templates

Sprint Preparation and Plans

Distribution

• Eggify components and get to pypi (everything in externals already there)
• getpaid.warehouse
• getpaid.report
• Finish GetPaid? recipe; Document usage
• Buildouts:
• Test and finish reorganization (base, 30, 25, currently on meteoroid-branch) and document buildouts (how to add getpaid)
• Document and use in DevGettingStarted
• Merge branch or copy files on existing buildout
• update anonymous buildout (diff svn externals and cfg file). Fairly easy, as it was last updated in August.

Bugs & Issues

• fix issues
• Issue #209
•  Issue #202 
• Issue #117
• Improve paypal processor: make multi-item checkout possible, make/fix admin screen for processor

i18n

• update translations
• Spanish: in progress (FranGM, Wu, cjj)
• French (very close to done)
• German
• Italian
• Chinese
• Dutch

Testing

• add greater test coverage:
• getpaid.report

Documentation

• gather/improve/update/add documentation (list specific here)
• Review and improve content type integration for devs doc
• How to show price (or other GetPaid? properties) on a template in your site
• How to wire payment process to a workflow state change (ie create a piece of content, but pay before it is published)
• How to get and use getpaid.formgen
• How to customize the checkout process (including using available slots, ie for comments)
• Enabling components in buildouts
• Using the new buildouts
• Using the recipe
• Review mailing list and document errors messages (on plone.org doc collection) and how to fix them
• How to get and use getpaid.salesforce
• ReorganizeIssueTracker (in progress; cjj, gabrielle)

Release prep

• 0.7.0 release (would support 2.5 and 3 together)
• update changelog on plone.org/products/getpaid
• branch code
• make a branch to separate future 2.5 and 3 support (dennis)

GetPaid Presentation at Plone Conf 2008

GetPaid will be present at the upcoming Plone Conference session "Ecommerce in Plone: Surveying the state of the art". If you are interested in learning what you can do with GetPaid, how the Sites Using GetPaid were made, and what you can do with GetPaid, please join us on Wednesday, October 8, 2008 (Day 1) at 2:30pm in the Polaris room for this presentation!

Also, don't forget that GetPaid will be present at the Plone Conference Sprint! Sign up to participate here. A schedule of tasks is coming in a week.

PloneFormGen Integration Gets Refactoring

You may have read about the integration between GetPaid and PloneFormGen that happened a couple months ago. Recently, it got some refactoring to make it clearer, thanks to perrito666 (aka Horacio Duran). He also implemented the ability for it to accept multiple "adapters" (in the PFG sense, not the Zope 3 sense). What does that mean? Now you can seamlessly use PloneFormGen with GetPaid and add in your Salesforce.com integration adapters (or whatever other PFG adapters you may have)!

The latest updates are available at the mercurial repo available here: http://code.except.com.ar/hg/hgwebdir.cgi/getpaid.formgen

Remote Sprints Continue to Further GetPaid

Lucie Lejard of Six Feet Up is the Goddess of Remote Sprints in GetPaid throughout the summer. After a vacation in France, she returned to wrap up work on improving ease of integrating GetPaid. She has been on a quest for the holy grail of GetPaid deployments - the recipe.

And behold! With the guidance of Clayton (claytron) she is unleashing the power of the recipe! The recipe grabs the eggs, grabs the vendor products, and makes GetPaid a part of your buildout! It is so close to finished.