GSoC

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.

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.