News

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

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.

The last three months have been a bit of a blur. One of the things that has fallen off my plate was updating the GetPaid blog. So, here's a roundup of news from GetPaid:

Product

• The preferred means of consumption is the recipe! Tarballs are soooo Plone 2! (nothing against tarballs, actually, just no one is packaging them - if you want to lend a hand let us know via the mailing list). So while there aren't any new tarballs about since the 0.6.2 version, GetPaid has actually advanced to 0.7.5 and just reached rev2400! The recipe itself is at version 1.4.1 thanks to the continued efforts of the marvellous Lucie Lejard (aka La Reina de la Receta). Here's some of the changes to look out for:
• Payment processors: Payflopro is now a supported payment processor (larubbio)! ClickandBuy is also supported (olauzanne)! Pagseguro (Brazilian processor) is also in the works (rafaelcrocha) as well as VCS South Africa (hannesc). Ogone, PayPal, and Authorize.net all got an updates.
• PloneFormGen integration: after the demise of the former mercurial repository where this product was hosted, the action adapter to integrate GetPaid with PloneFormGen was migrated into the GetPaid repository (mcgruff.scruff).
• Variable donations amount: GetPaid now natively supports variable donations amounts that can be added to your cart (larubbio)
  
• Salesforce.com Integration: There is a new prodcut, Products.SalesforceGetPaidAdapter. It subclasses from the current Products.salesforcepfgadapter and allows you to specify what fields in your form, and in getpaids order get saved to salesforce when the order's finance workflow moves to CHARGED.(larubbio)
• More goodies: The cart now allows annotations (larubbio), checkout checks for site root to get store settings (lucielejard), discount details are reflected on the thank you page (flejard)
  

Documentation

• How to use the PloneFormGen integration (download PDF)
  
• Features page got light update. 
• Creating Content Types That Are Buyable, Shippable or Donations (dunny, copied from Products.PloneGetPaid documentation to web)
• How do I set up buildout for an existing Plone site with the getpaid recipe? (lucielejard)
• How to tie actions to payments (A brief explanation on how to tie workflow transitions, mailing, etcetera to a payment happening in getpaid) (perrito)
  

Sites

Collecting data on this has been a bit thin lately, even though several people have shared information about sites in the works. One that did launch with GetPaid just today is the York College/City University of New York. If you have additional sites that are live with GetPaid, please let us know via the mailing list!

Community

• Mailing list: 163 people
• Planning continues at our Features Brainstorm doc: http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/wiki/BrainstormingFeatures . Join in! Some of these features are on the drawing boards for Spring development.
  

Not your average Plone cookies or pizzas recipe, this is a recipe for getting paid!

Thanks to Lucie for updating the GetPaid recipe.You can get the new version on pypi:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/getpaid.recipe.release/1.2 (see this link for readme on using the recipe to make it easy to add ecommerce to your Plone site).

The changes are:

* update the version for: getpaid.core, Products.PloneGetPaid, five.intid, getpaid.googlecheckout, getpaid.paypal and getpaid.discount
* added getpaid.report and getpaid.warehouse to the recipe

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

This month's Python Magazine has a nice surprise for us: GetPaid all over the cover! Horacio (aka perrito666), who presented GetPaid at a free software conference in Argentina not too long ago also wrote an article which appears in this month's edition of Python Magazine and is featured prominently on the cover.

Building E-commerce on Plone with GetPaid, by Horacio Durán

E-commerce sites are easier to build than you think, especially using Plone and GetPaid. From small non-governmental organizations to independent professionals, many current Plone users would profit greatly from adding e-commerce abilities to their online presence. The task has been beyond the grasp of many otherwise competent website owners because of the complexity of the available solutions. No more: GetPaid can easily convert any Plone site into a complete e-commerce solution.

Read more about this month's edition and purchase it online at http://pymag.phparch.com/c/issue/view/85 (sadly, we don't get any referral benefit...maybe the magazine will cut us a slice of their earnings ;).

Happy World Plone Day! It is a day of a lot of activity across the planet for Plone. It is also the week before the Bolzano sprint in Italy!

Recently, Bruno from Abstract Solutions posted information about taking on GetPaid as a topic during the sprint. The Abstract folks must have had fun in DC at the Plone Conference sprint on GetPaid and are coming back for more!

We are glad they are taking an active role on making GetPaid better and making GetPaid's second sprint in Italy happen! If you are headed to Bolzano, we hope you will join up with Bruno and others. We also may have some remote sprinting going on, so jiump on #getpaid to find us during the Bolzano Sprint, Nov 11-13!

Several fixes have gone into a minor release of GetPaid that is now available in both a tag in SVN and a bundled product for download. This includes a fix to ensure it works on Plone 3.1.5+, a fix to the pagination of orders management, and other small changes. No significant feature changes from the original 0.6 branch, but this is now the recommended version.

• You can download it here: http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/downloads/list
  
• Find it in svn here: https://getpaid.googlecode.com/svn/tags/0.6.2
  
• Or read more about GetPaid here: www.PloneGetPaid.com