sprint

Special thanks to CalvinHP, Claytron, and ChrisW for enthusiasm for taking on the taxes in GetPaid.

At the Plone Symposium in New Orleans, we did some collaborative design of the needs and requirements for tax infrastructure. Then, on last Friday, Calvin, Clayton, and Chris busted out the infrastructure!

Calvin's update reports:

Non-code news

• First thing to mention is that we passed 400 downloads of the release candidate tarball! We have no way of knowing how many people are on buildout, but that adds to the growing number of users.
• Speaking of buildout...it's worth mentioning that there is now a handy tool/bundle to help Windows users get going with buildout! You can read about the "installer for buildout-ready Windows" here. Haven't used it, but glad to know that the windows users are getting exposed to more buildout goodness :)
• Google code added a sweet trac-ish-on-ajax code browser. Check out GetPaid's code here. 
• Anyone going to Plone Symposium East? There is still time to submit a proposal for a session on GetPaid (though that ends this Friday)! If you are interested, check it out.
  

Sprints

• There was mention of interest of GetPaid for the Sorrento sprint. If you are looking to hang out with great folks in lovely place, check out Sorrento sprint!
  
• There was even mention of a potential DocComm II sprint for this summer at Google again!
  

If you are interesting in organizing or leading GetPaid sprint activities, please do! Please also share your interest with others on our mailing list.

Code and related

• Big news lately was the merge of work done in a branch into the trunk. This brought in UPS integration, a backend for address books, and a refactored checkout wizard.
  
• Since the merge, several fixes and modifications have happened including, and there have been several points where the buildout was not in ideal condition, but things are looking up:
• Making xml dependency more sane: the buildout got a bit unwieldy with a dependency on lxml. Liam refactored that out (I believe it is just going to use elementtree). Several folks in the channel today agreed that we need to avoid making the buildout more difficult as a point of distribution. We want people using GetPaid...not fighting with the tool. 
• Javier and Perrito fixed compatibility of the new checkout wizard with Plone 2.5 after finding a problem with an import of IBrowserView failing
• Dunny did some externals cleanup on the anonymous buildout and Kapil updated the anonymous buildout also. This brings the anon buildout up to date with the merge and changes in the development version.
  
• Kapil made several modifications to the checkout wizard and its state handling.
• There is also a lot of stuff planned and at various stages of being worked on:
• UPS UI integration is well advanced. Please have a look, especially if you are able to help out.
  
• Inventory/warehouse management: Ability to turn this on for a product and site. Keep track of where your stuff is as well as how much of it you have.
  
• Reporting and storage of orders in relational database: Work is planned on storing orders in a relational (postgres) db and then providing new reports.
  
• Liam also reports that shipping using USPS (that's US Postal Service for those not in the US) will be easy building on the UPS integration module.
  
• UI refactoring: after some deployments, there is some frustration with UI and skinning GetPaid that can be overcome with a bit of UI love...
  
• Probably more goodies too...but I'll leave it at that for now :)

We have been plugging away in Naples and now at the end of our sprint.

We got good progress today, but the list kept growing even as we got things done. We mostly focused on tests, and also got some minor improvements in the system. Today included UI, issues, translations, and functional and unit tests. More tests needed, as we didn't know how all the pieces were supposed to function (ie not tested).

Would be great to have people start testing and file issues if you find anything (http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/issues/list ). I suspect a RC tarball will be available late this week or early next week.

Status:

• Content catalog work nearly done. One test still failing, so Jean is branching getpaid.core to continue working on it (with Kapil).
• Functional tests from yesterday and the checkout ones made today are now failing in one place. So we had to do some
• Cart and cart portlet tweaked to show number of total items (as opposed to number of types of items, ie 2 shoes and 4 hats = 6 items vs 2).
• plonegetpaid.com updated with information about Red Ochre release
• Issue 124 is fixed, though ideally it still needs to write the error to the exception log for reference
• A German translation got committed.
• You can see the two earlier updates here: http://plonegetpaid.com/updates/archive/2007/10/
  

Things on the list not yet done:

• testing the new features manually (duplicate processing protection, mail notification fix)
• documentation on making a payment processor and development practices/conventions
• migrating more documentation from the wiki to plone.org
• document dev conventions: update and run tests before commit. capitalizations.

Thanks for your support and following the project. Thanks especially to Jean, John, Ricardo, Florino, Reed, Andreas, Davide, and Guissepe. And especially thanks to Kapil, whose engineering has been a great way to interest and involve more developers, and who has done so much of the product we have today.

Overall, sprinter numbers are way down today as many people head home, but GetPaid sprint is still with seven people. At this point in the day, we are the largest sprinting group...

We are now over 900 commits in the repository (912, at this moment)!

Today we discovered some important features that were running without tests, so more testing has been added to the getpaid.core in the order and buyable catalog thanks to Jean Francois. Additionally, we finished off two important issues, thanks to Florian and Ricardo. We also got a new means of protecting the user from duplicate transactions working (we are requesting review and testing of this) thanks to John. Additionally I updated information on plone.org about the product and started updating the home page with release info, including the list of features. We also got a German translation thanks to Andreas. As you can see on the side, we also got a release icon! Thanks to Luke Aune for help on that one.

The order manager is currently being refactored to handle cataloging the products (for use in backups). The checkout wizard is in the process of having functional browser tests implemented. The UI is getting cleaned up some (titles on admin pages, including making additional skinning possible (so elements of PloneGetPaid inherit your site's styles).

Naples Sprint

There's over a hundred people in the Naples Sprint, post Plone Conference. There are lots of topics and projects going on here. GetPaid's goal for this sprint is to get out a release candidate of the Red Ochre release.

GetPaid: Day 1

On the first day, we recruited a group of 8 to work on the project. We reviewed our task list and refined it some. Before delving into refactoring, we discovered that our product tests were in need of serious attention. Though work has gone on recently in building in tests in the getpaid.core (Zope 3 library) - in part to make to easier to upgrade to Plone 3.0 - the PloneGetPaid (Plone wrapper product) was desperately needing improvement. Some tests created during the Google sprint were completely outdated and needed removal, and large sections of the product needed tests. This quickly became a priority for considering a release. Reed also cleaned up some of the naming in the product to make it more consistent.

In this process, Jean Francois introduced a product into the buildout for making functional tests called Test Recorder. It allowed me (read "not a developer") to make functional doctests for the product! That was exciting, as I had no idea it could be so easy (ie literally just clicking through the site and adding some comments).

We also updating the Plone version to the latest release in the series (2.5.4) and updated the Five version to 1.4 to allow for browsertesting.

Davide also worked on getting us onto GenericSetup best practices. Things were removed from the install.py and cleaned up for GenericSetup.

Davide also made an example customization policy to ship with the product to demonstrate how to change settings. This complements the Zope 3 approach to customization discussed in documentation and in Martin's talk from the conference.

A small bug in the policy display was fixed.

Liam, sprinting remotely, also checked in several UPS integration files to the branch he is working on, which included tests.

On the internationalization front, Ricardo added a Portuguese (Portugal) translation, Giuseppe updated the Italian translation.

That's about it for day one! Looks better when I actually write it all down :)

Day 2

We are already under way for the day. Unit tests in PloneGetPaid are getting advanced, and the GenericSetup work is completed already!

More later...

Dear friends of GetPaid, Plone, and Zope,

What an exciting journey this has been over the last six months, with lots of coding, bugs, learning, and evolving to get this far with GetPaid. We are so close to ready for the release of the product that we have even made a list of remaining tasks! That is a great feeling, and we would like to invite you to join us in sprinting for the release candidate!

After the Plone conference, we will participate at the Naples Sprint, October 13-15. Come show off your Zope3 skills, or join me in putting the software through tests. Or just get your geek on in dabbling in some cool code! We welcome Plone and Zope 3 developers, testers, documenters, UI wizards, cheerleaders, cebadores, musicians and anyone else who feels compelled to join in the process of releasing GetPaid. Onsite and remote sprinters welcome!

To find out more on the sprint, please see http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/wiki/NaplesSprint 

If you aren't already a member of the project, you can request via our contact form or by putting your details on the sprint web site.

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.

ThePlone sprint will happen on i18n of GetPaid for Plone on August 9, 2007. It will include training on internationlization and then a day of collaborative work on GetPaid internationalization. Other interesting during the conference Plone training (a site admin/content management one AND an intermediary developer training!) and many Zope/Plone/Python talks.

Call for testing reminder!