payment processing

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!

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

GetPaid stuff updates:

• Now 520 downloads of tarballs of latest stable release (0.6.1)
• My favorite quote from the channel today:
  (06:39:57 PM) codingharrison: oh man ... I really like this code
  (06:40:03 PM) codingharrison: happy programmer :)

PayPal lands at GetPaid

Today Dennis Harrison showed up in #getpaid on a mission. He is building a store and pumping out a bunch of features for a deadline of Monday...well, part of that was to support Paypal in GetPaid. He grabbed the existing Paypal integration work, and in 28 minutes and 53 seconds,  got a (tested) working version for PayPal sandbox. Check it out on the tag in our code repository in this temporary tag.

Next is to dive into getting the IPN (Instant Payment Notification) support too (ie so you don't actually have to send someone off to paypal). Look for that starting tomorrow!

Other Payment Processor News

Payment Express is a Visa and MasterCard certified solution, developed by DPS, which facilitates electronic payments seamlessly from multiple access points i.e. Web, EFTPOS, Billing, Interactive Voice Responce, CRM, Vending, MOTO (Mail Order / Telephone Order) and Wireless.

DPS are certified with banks in Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Singapore, South Africa, USA and United Kingdom.

The payment processor is distributed as an egg getpaid.pxpay and is available on http://pypi.python.org/pypi.

This processor plugs in to the final step of the checkout. It provides the mechanism to securely authorize payment offsite.

See: http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/source/browse/trunk/getpaid.pxpay/src/getpaid/pxpay/README.txt for more help/discussion.

Thanks to Matt Halstead for integrating this and Darryl Dixon for kicking off the development!

What a busy month! I think I have missed about 150 revisions since the last update, so here goes an attempt to catch up...to get the latest, grab our buildout (see documentation here).

Some stats:

• Over 500 downloads of our last stable release!
• A good number of tests going into new products!
• There are now LOTS of open issues (68, actually) in the tracker, which includes lots of change/improvement requests also. If you want to help out please take 'em on!
  

Highlights of what is in the latest code now:

• UPS shipping support. Still don't quite understand it (some configuration magic that has to happen), but there has been a LOT of work to get this going. Thanks to Kapil, Liam, Perrito and others for working, reworking, and fixing this.
  
• Shipping setup: this got refactored to be a bit cleaner and have some nice viewlets. Makes it easy to add in multiple shipping methods as we grow.
  
• Inventory management: Yes!!! getpaid.warehouse now available. This is a rather recent addition (you can only find it now by adding @@inventory to the URL), but it is there! Checkouts change the quantity, there is the ability to add warehouses for a site. More goodies to come as the work is rounded out by Kapil. Nicely done!
• Address book: Thanks to a use case we had for an ifPeople client, we built a means of saving shipping addresses in your profile during checkout, which are then accessible in checkout.
  
• Auto-loading your details: get tired of typing same details into the screen? Now they get autoloaded! Go lazy programmers!!
• Order templates: reordering your viagra supply ever couple months? Now you can save time in checkout by loading your orders from your past orders!
• Shipping price wired into total price: Now when you select shipping service, it will be added to the total price in the cart/checkout. 
• SSL: Now, by default, the site wants SSL. If you are just testing, you need to deactivate this in the GetPaid setup area for checkout to work. 
• Checkout wizard refactoring: after a significant refactoring, it got some fixes and improvements and additional testing.
  
• Relational database: there is also a relational database implementation of getpaid.core (called getpaid.rdb).
  

• PayPal processor interface!!! No really...I am serious! daMaestro told me in #getpaid just now :)
• PXPay processor: The Kiwis finally have their chance at GetPaid too! Apparently Winterhouse Consulting has done an implementation of this pay processor from Payment Express.
  
• Authorize.net recurring payments: ifPeople has also done integration with of the Automatic Recurring Billing (ARB) service of authorize.net. Currently in a branch...
• A new release: no details...but probably will be associated with a shipping wrap up. Possibly in late April.
  
• More sites using GetPaid!

Now in the code:

• UK processor: As I was reminded today, Google Checkout supports UK and US merchants, so enjoy blokes!
• Printing: Emanuel checked in integration of "print" options a la Plone for the interfaces for orders, order details, and order confirmation!
  

In the works:

• Checkout refactoring: Kapil is experimenting with a new way to make the checkout screens very flexible!
• Multiple currency management: Very early planning stages for managing multiple currencies in GetPaid! Look for user stories for review coming soon.
  
• Address book management: Want to be able to ship to multiple people? You will be able to save your addresses in an address book and use them on checkout.
  
• Discounts: still looking for some help to get this incorporated properly. Got eggs?
  

Desired features looking for developers:

• Payment processors:
  
• PayPal
• usaePay
• PloneFormGen adapter: imagine making flexible forms that tie into GetPaid seemlessly! 
• UI integrators: the address book work is done in the backend but needs some integration work for UI, including javascript/ajax goodness.
  

It's great to see we are almost at 300 downloads for the GetPaid RC1! So far just one small bug in that file so far so expect a final shortly. Already, new work has started on the trunk and in some of the branches, so I wanted to give a quick update about two exciting pieces.

Google Checkout Integration

Thanks to Michael Dunstan, a simple integration of Google Checkout now exists for GetPaid! That gets your order straight into Google Checkout so you can use their infrastructure for fulfillment and order management. See screenshot of order management interface.

This is good news for US non-profit organizations, as Google is offering GoogleCheckout for free (at least through end of this year). That means no processing fees, monthly fees etc to accept donations online!

Still pending is a smooth buildout experience to get the feature, but if you are interested, check here to check out the product (especially README!).

More sophisticated integration (ie getting messages back to GetPaid from Google Checkout) requires an SSL certificate and secure communications with the Plone site.

UPS Shipping Integration

Liam started off UPS integration and Kapil has refactored it, including unit tests and more. Now shipping costs can be looked up in real time from your GetPaid site. The work is currently happening in the UPS branch of the code, but will be rolled into the trunk and available tomorrow.

Some other goodies in the work include persistent shopping cart, ability to print order, and more!

I just posted a note on theploneblog.org that I have been waiting to post since the Google sprint - an entry about GetPaid's birthday. Honestly, I had no idea so much was going to happen during this week. I am in Argentina at a retreat with our development team (made up for FairSource partners). Kapil decided to up and head to Argentina as well...

Last week was an enormous regional Free Software conference, where Plone was a main feature. There were dozens of Plone, Zope and Python talks (about 1500 people total). I gave a talk on "social sourcing", which is the name I use for how the project has been organized (and which just got accepted for the Plone Conference) and we organized an i18n sprint for GetPaid.