Entries For: 2009

Just a quick note to let you know I refreshed our Ohloh.net listing. A broken link had kept the code from getting re-scanned for about six months, so existing packages were out of date. Additionally, there were over 10 enlistments to add (and somehow Products.PloneGetPaid got left off last time...oops, sorry!!). We've got several new payment processors as well as the add on tools, which are now included in the Ohloh enlistments. So, now we're reported as having over 25,000 lines of code! Check it out at http://www.ohloh.net/p/GetPaid  (by the way, if you see any problems with the enlistments, please let me know)

Also, this updates our contributor stats so we can see our recent biggest contributers, like Rob, Mikko, and Taito. Have a look at the contributors list. And thanks to all our contributors!! If you haven't already, you can add yourself to the map there!

If you haven't been following the great insights posted by Brandon Rhodes on the GetPaid mailing list, there is some quality analysis going on for GetPaid at the moment. Brandon started off seeking to improve handling offsite payment processing and has found some other opportunities to improve Getpaid's checkout wizard. In exploring this, he's seeking advice! Here's an excerpt from his blog post:

I would like some advice from Zope and Plone folks about how to create forms that are not only easy for other developers to specialize, but which allow several specializations to be composed together. While I have used zope.formlib and z3c.form before for simple tasks, I have not yet been able to tell whether they support these more advanced kinds of operations.

If you have any ideas, please head over to his blog post to leave some ideas. Thanks!

GetPaid is a unique project as a Google Summer of Code project, as the team is all located in the same city (Atlanta, GA, which, fyi, is host of the 2010 PyCon!). This past week, we kicked off the project with Derek Richardson (student), Brandon Rhodes (mentor) and Chris Johnson ("client", GetPaid community) with a meeting at ifPeople's offices. The goal of the project is to refactor the GetPaid Checkout Wizard to allow for a more integrated experience when using offsite payment processing.

At the meeting we went through the challenges that created the need for the project, with specific examples, and compiled a list of references for the project (all of which is documented on the wiki page for this project). One of the most important accomplishments for me was clarifying the user stories for the GSoC project. What we came up with top priorities to start with is:

• As a site owner, I want to set a payment processor that has my customers enter all their info and credit card information directly on the payment processor's website.
• As a site owner, I want to capture customer info on my site and then have customer enter credit card info on payment processor's website
• As a site owner, I configure how my payment processor should work (all onsite, all offsite, mixed) 

With greater pluggability of the checkout process, we hope that site owners will be able to configure the payment processor integration how they choose, with combinations of options for doing it all on site, all off site, or a mixed solution.

The next step is that Derek is coming up with 2-3 options for solving these use cases. We'll be discussing that via the mailing list (as well as ongoing updates to the project), so if you have comments, feedback, ideas or a desire to participate, please let us know on the mailing list! Look for the first update on the plans in a week's time.

As a sign of how important the role of ecommerce is to creating a complete CMS offering these days, this year's World Plone Day included features of the GetPaid product for Plone. Though there may have been more, 2 places I know it was mentioned include:

• Brazil: Luciano Pacheco presented a session "Using GetPaid" in Sao Paulo.
  
• Ukraine: Olha Pelishok gave a presentation on ecommerce in Plone and an extensive overview of GetPaid. Her slides (in English) and video (in Ukrainian) are available online here: http://www.plug.org.ua/video/ecommerce/view

The work proposed by Derek Richardson to refactor the GetPaid checkout wizard was accepted as a project for the Plone Foundation's Google Summer of Code! Brandon Rhodes will be mentoring Derek throughout the hot, humid Atlanta summer. By the end, we hope life for developers using GetPaid will be easier. So far we have 3 main user stories for the refactoring:

• As a developer, I want to add a field to the checkout wizard
• As a site owner, I want my customers to enter in credit card information directly on the payment processor's website
• As a site owner, I want to configure my payment processor settings to use on-site or off-site entry of credit card information

Plone was accepted again as a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code, where Google pays students to code in open source projects. Now the challenge is getting good proposals from students - and the deadline is April 3 at 19:00 UTC!

GetPaid is one of the proposed project for the GSoC. In particulare, work is proposed to refactor the checkout wizard to make it more flexible to developers and more accomodating to off-site payments (ie enter your credit card details directly on the payment processor's site).

This is a very important part of the development of GetPaid, and paves the way to a new major version and eventually a 1.0! If you are a mentor, we hope you will review the proposal and add notes.

Taking advantage of the time leading up to when GSoC coding starts, we will be working to refine the requirements and get feedback from the GetPaid community.

If you have comments or ideas, please share on our mailing list!  If you want to apply as a student, check out this note.

The last three months have been a bit of a blur. One of the things that has fallen off my plate was updating the GetPaid blog. So, here's a roundup of news from GetPaid:

Product

• The preferred means of consumption is the recipe! Tarballs are soooo Plone 2! (nothing against tarballs, actually, just no one is packaging them - if you want to lend a hand let us know via the mailing list). So while there aren't any new tarballs about since the 0.6.2 version, GetPaid has actually advanced to 0.7.5 and just reached rev2400! The recipe itself is at version 1.4.1 thanks to the continued efforts of the marvellous Lucie Lejard (aka La Reina de la Receta). Here's some of the changes to look out for:
• Payment processors: Payflopro is now a supported payment processor (larubbio)! ClickandBuy is also supported (olauzanne)! Pagseguro (Brazilian processor) is also in the works (rafaelcrocha) as well as VCS South Africa (hannesc). Ogone, PayPal, and Authorize.net all got an updates.
• PloneFormGen integration: after the demise of the former mercurial repository where this product was hosted, the action adapter to integrate GetPaid with PloneFormGen was migrated into the GetPaid repository (mcgruff.scruff).
• Variable donations amount: GetPaid now natively supports variable donations amounts that can be added to your cart (larubbio)
  
• Salesforce.com Integration: There is a new prodcut, Products.SalesforceGetPaidAdapter. It subclasses from the current Products.salesforcepfgadapter and allows you to specify what fields in your form, and in getpaids order get saved to salesforce when the order's finance workflow moves to CHARGED.(larubbio)
• More goodies: The cart now allows annotations (larubbio), checkout checks for site root to get store settings (lucielejard), discount details are reflected on the thank you page (flejard)
  

Documentation

• How to use the PloneFormGen integration (download PDF)
  
• Features page got light update. 
• Creating Content Types That Are Buyable, Shippable or Donations (dunny, copied from Products.PloneGetPaid documentation to web)
• How do I set up buildout for an existing Plone site with the getpaid recipe? (lucielejard)
• How to tie actions to payments (A brief explanation on how to tie workflow transitions, mailing, etcetera to a payment happening in getpaid) (perrito)
  

Sites

Collecting data on this has been a bit thin lately, even though several people have shared information about sites in the works. One that did launch with GetPaid just today is the York College/City University of New York. If you have additional sites that are live with GetPaid, please let us know via the mailing list!

Community

• Mailing list: 163 people
• Planning continues at our Features Brainstorm doc: http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/wiki/BrainstormingFeatures . Join in! Some of these features are on the drawing boards for Spring development.
  

Not your average Plone cookies or pizzas recipe, this is a recipe for getting paid!

Thanks to Lucie for updating the GetPaid recipe.You can get the new version on pypi:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/getpaid.recipe.release/1.2 (see this link for readme on using the recipe to make it easy to add ecommerce to your Plone site).

The changes are:

* update the version for: getpaid.core, Products.PloneGetPaid, five.intid, getpaid.googlecheckout, getpaid.paypal and getpaid.discount
* added getpaid.report and getpaid.warehouse to the recipe