Entries For: September 2007

Interface with GetPaid-development mailing list at http://www.nabble.com/GetPaid-for-Plone---Dev-f27137.html

Chris Johnson will give his presentation on "Social Sourcing and the Story of GetPaid". The talk will talk about the process by which the project was organized (and how money was raised for a free software project) and what that process could mean for guiding the future of Plone's development in a way that integrates developers with the broader community.

See the Atlanta Plone event page for more info.

Since not all of our readers and follower are subscribed to the changes mailing list (where you should go for the real gory details of what happens to the code base...), I am preparing a summary of that info from the logs (while I wait for a new buildout), so I am very excited to see some of this stuff go into the product! (for those who want to get their hands on the latest, there is a new tarball as of this writing at http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/downloads/list )

• Anonymous checkout: Kapil hammered out a number of features and improvements here, including a configuration option!
  
• User Contact Info: Kapil added a schema for this in the product and also, this info is now pulled from member info on checkout (sweet!)
• Javier added a custom widget for setting credit card expiration date, making the checkout interface more user friendly, and also added display for additional information on the final page of checkout.
  
• JPG reinstated the shipping features for the system (/me is sorry for requesting their removal...)
• Checkout without session: Kapil also factored out the session for checkout...and made the pages of checkout screens save values between screens. The checkout wizard is now also bidirectional (/me admits to having no idea what that means...)
• Payment workflow: the default behavior was modified to authorize and capture payments (rather than authorizing them and then requiring the site admin to capture the payment). Additionally, workflow event driven payment processor integration happened.
  
• There is now an empty cart view

• Ken made a number of changes...in particular, improving the way information is passed to the authorize.net payment processor, making it easier to track who made payments!
• Ken also made some help text additions to the product, which show inline
• Javier fixed the GetPaid profile setting for country and state, which now saves the value entered.
  

While we have been focused on the development of GetPaid (get the latest at http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/downloads/list ), there are a number of new products out, or about to be, so I have updated and reorganized a bit the Plone Commerce Background page. For convenience, I am copying the new stuff here.

NOTE: I am not endorsing any of these and this is not intended to be a review of these products. If you are seeking a commerce solution, it is recommended that you carefully review the products in question for quality of the framework, interface, and support/community - in addition to the features - before making a choice.

In the order from most recent (for my discovery of them):

• Sustainable Shop (ssShop): according to one of the developers, it is "an out-of-the-box online shop which includes, amongst other things, paid-for downloads, and product variants, as well as regular shop products". The product was based on work for the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society, and can be seen in action here: http://www.rscds.org/shop .  Pending a 1.0 final release shortly, for now the code can be found at: http://ssplone.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ssplone/ssShop/trunk/
• Emencia Commerce Suite: An Open Source commerce product built on Zope / Zwook / relational database. Handles country, shipping, taxes, order workflow, currencies, customers, catalog, coupons/promotions, and orders management.  Find more information at http://www.emenciacommerce.com/en/aboutecs/functionalities
• Quintagroup Ecommerce Solution: The first for-fee (not free) Plone commerce product I have come across (costs US$430), it is designed to run an online store as "a universal tool for managing products in the online store". It is developed for Plone 2.5 and uses SimpleCartItem (see below) and seems to consist of a product content type and some portlets, inventory function, as well as a currency preference feature. Find more on the product at http://quintagroup.com/solutions/e-commerce
  
• SimpleCartItem: Developed by the folks at netCorps, SimpleCartItem is designed to provide a basic content type that integrates with online stores such as PayPal store and allows for various attributes on an item (color, size, etc). It works with both Plone 2.1 and 2.5 and draws from PloneMall and PlonePayPal. It appears to also work with 2Checkout processor. Find more at http://plone.org/products/simplecartitem

There are more all the time, so it looks like we are getting some healthy competition in the Plone commerce space finally!

I am definitely getting antsy, and it seems like others are also, for a release. This last week, the channel has been livelier (#getpaid), new nightly builds are being sent out for testing, the wiki is getting tweaked more as documentation is getting drafted, and the tarballs keep rolling off the download area as people test and use the product. I added an issue and then realized it was the 100th issue reported (though as of the writing of this, less than half of those are open, and only a couple dozen are for this release). There was really no way we could have known what this product was going to turn into when we started, since we haven't done anything like this before...and we have learned a LOT along the way! The product itself has transformed, both in its vision as well as technically speaking, since we started.

It is exciting to see the sites that are in development and waiting for the product - or already incorporating it at an early stage. Some of the sponsors are hard at work on those, including Trees for Life, which will be launching its new site with GetPaid, as well as Contextual Corporation, ifPeople and Totsie.com, who are all working on client sites with GetPaid. In addition, our community has grown and we also have folks in Italy actively contributing development towards commerce sites.

While the system itself is currently working (download it here), there are still a few more significant pieces to put in place, such as the backup manager. There are several smaller tweaks we are evaluating and working on as well, including i18n cleanup, inline documentation, etc. If you are interested to help, please check out remaining issues!

As we near the Plone Conference, where we have 2 GetPaid talks included, the pending release is even more exciting!  Though I am already thinking about the celebration for the release...it is also a time when we are getting several inquiries about the future - new features, extensions for new use cases, integration with other systems, adding new payment processors, etc etc...and we realize how what initially was like kicking a little pebble down a hill has turned into quite a movement with a lot of energy and excitement from the community.

Thank you all for your support! Let's make this an awesome release and a vibrant, sustainable community :)