GetPaid Google Summer of Code Project Launches

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.