Entries For: May 2009

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