PloneFormGen

Surveying the State of the Art in Plone Ecommerce

I intended my talk for the conference to be a good learning experience that pushed my own understanding of GetPaid. As I am not a developer, I certainly don't know how to do a lot of things that people do with GetPaid. But, as GetPaid was my motive for actually learning how to use svn and making my first checkin, I figure I should be able to figure some of this stuff out using the available documentation and my knowledge of GetPaid. So as part of my talk, which will be walking through what you can do with GetPaid: out of the box, with community addons and with basic customziations, I have been asking a lot of questions! This has motivated some new documentation being produced that will continue to support new community members who are finding GetPaid. Also, I found a few bugs that are now in our tracker.

Some of the things I will show:

• Managing inventory with GetPaid
• One-page checkout (with PloneFormGen integration)
• Making a store

• Pay-to-publish content (working that integrates a payment step for job listings, ads, applications, etc)
• Making your own content type buyable (programmatically)
• Showing GetPaid information on your templates

Sprint Preparation and Plans

Distribution

• Eggify components and get to pypi (everything in externals already there)
• getpaid.warehouse
• getpaid.report
• Finish GetPaid? recipe; Document usage
• Buildouts:
• Test and finish reorganization (base, 30, 25, currently on meteoroid-branch) and document buildouts (how to add getpaid)
• Document and use in DevGettingStarted
• Merge branch or copy files on existing buildout
• update anonymous buildout (diff svn externals and cfg file). Fairly easy, as it was last updated in August.

Bugs & Issues

• fix issues
• Issue #209
•  Issue #202 
• Issue #117
• Improve paypal processor: make multi-item checkout possible, make/fix admin screen for processor

i18n

• update translations
• Spanish: in progress (FranGM, Wu, cjj)
• French (very close to done)
• German
• Italian
• Chinese
• Dutch

Testing

• add greater test coverage:
• getpaid.report

Documentation

• gather/improve/update/add documentation (list specific here)
• Review and improve content type integration for devs doc
• How to show price (or other GetPaid? properties) on a template in your site
• How to wire payment process to a workflow state change (ie create a piece of content, but pay before it is published)
• How to get and use getpaid.formgen
• How to customize the checkout process (including using available slots, ie for comments)
• Enabling components in buildouts
• Using the new buildouts
• Using the recipe
• Review mailing list and document errors messages (on plone.org doc collection) and how to fix them
• How to get and use getpaid.salesforce
• ReorganizeIssueTracker (in progress; cjj, gabrielle)

Release prep

• 0.7.0 release (would support 2.5 and 3 together)
• update changelog on plone.org/products/getpaid
• branch code
• make a branch to separate future 2.5 and 3 support (dennis)

GetPaid Presentation at Plone Conf 2008

GetPaid will be present at the upcoming Plone Conference session "Ecommerce in Plone: Surveying the state of the art". If you are interested in learning what you can do with GetPaid, how the Sites Using GetPaid were made, and what you can do with GetPaid, please join us on Wednesday, October 8, 2008 (Day 1) at 2:30pm in the Polaris room for this presentation!

Also, don't forget that GetPaid will be present at the Plone Conference Sprint! Sign up to participate here. A schedule of tasks is coming in a week.

PloneFormGen Integration Gets Refactoring

You may have read about the integration between GetPaid and PloneFormGen that happened a couple months ago. Recently, it got some refactoring to make it clearer, thanks to perrito666 (aka Horacio Duran). He also implemented the ability for it to accept multiple "adapters" (in the PFG sense, not the Zope 3 sense). What does that mean? Now you can seamlessly use PloneFormGen with GetPaid and add in your Salesforce.com integration adapters (or whatever other PFG adapters you may have)!

The latest updates are available at the mercurial repo available here: http://code.except.com.ar/hg/hgwebdir.cgi/getpaid.formgen

Remote Sprints Continue to Further GetPaid

Lucie Lejard of Six Feet Up is the Goddess of Remote Sprints in GetPaid throughout the summer. After a vacation in France, she returned to wrap up work on improving ease of integrating GetPaid. She has been on a quest for the holy grail of GetPaid deployments - the recipe.

And behold! With the guidance of Clayton (claytron) she is unleashing the power of the recipe! The recipe grabs the eggs, grabs the vendor products, and makes GetPaid a part of your buildout! It is so close to finished.

First, a quick note...we now have over 400 downloads of our latest release (0.6.1).

Second, Ohloh reports GetPaid as now over 15,000 lines of code!

Third, there has been a good bit of code sharing going on in the community as people are helping each other in their specific projects. Keep an eye on (or join) the mailing list if you want to learn more or partake! Adding fields on the checkout, removing fields, changing payment options and more have all been discussed recently.

And, there was a new piece of documentation written about upgrading your GetPaid and Plone. Check out http://ejahn.net/Members/eric/stories/getpaid-.6-update

Finally, we are up to 125 people on the mailing list.

Code updates:

• Discounts: the discounts product has been getting an overhaul by Lucie. Latest changes include the discount portlet (shows info on the discount). Note to 2.5 users, check the README for how to get this working in your site). The product has had some fixes and has evolved.
  
• Maurits also reported changes: The price of an item is now added to its catalog brain.  So when you have a list of brains and want to know the price of them you no longer need to do a getObject and an adapter lookup to get that price.  The price is directly in the searchResults of the portal_catalog.
  This needs a reinstall btw.  And you should rebuild the catalog afterwards to get the most benefit out of it.
• And a second from Maurits: When you make an item payable, getpaid.core fires an event.  I added an event handler to PloneGetPaid that is subscribed to that event. This makes sure that the changed item gets reindexed.  That is handy for the first change above.  And in Plone 3 there is the object_provides index for which this also helps.
• Issue 152 was fixed, thanks Lucie and Maurits for working that out. This should keep the "payable" tab happy in both Plone 3 and 2.5. 
• Chinese translation was submitted by Adam

• PloneFormGen and GetPaid integration is available in the repository at http://mercurial.intuxication.org/hg/getpaid-formgen . This product allows two ways of making a formgen form: 1) create a cart from a single page or 2) create a cart and checkout from a single page. Have a look at this product (based on the way the Salesforce.com adapter for PFG works)! It is now in at least one production site...thanks to Daniel and Horacio for making this happen!
  

• A patch to fix issue 174 has been created by Robert (Jamie) and will be added to trunk shortly. This will allow anonymous users who register as part of checkout to keep the contents of their cart.
  
• Restructuring the svn repository: now that we have a proliferation of products in the GetPaid space, releasing has become challenging with just tagging the whole bunch. Restructuring so each product has its own trunk, branches, tags will enable separate lifecycles to be in play.
  
• Eggs on pypi: finally...
• New viewlet spots on the checkout wizard to allow easy registration of information collection boxes (or whatever) in those spots, as opposed to overriding the checkout. 
• Refinement of the PloneFormGen + GetPaid integration so it plays nicely with Salesforce.com + PFG integration. Also, configurable salesforce.com integation with regular GetPaid checkout.
  

The Symposium in New Orleans was a hotbed of GetPaid collaboration. We jump started a collaborative design process for integration PloneFormGen with GetPaid based on the nifty Salesforce.com adapter for PFG. Now, a week after we left New Orleans, already work is rapidly evolving:

• SteveM added a new feature to PFG (so action adapters can fail) and the code is tested and ready to release - thanks SteveM!!
• DanielHolth and perrito666 have been furiously hacking away and sharing code in a mercurial repository.
  
• Daniel's update today:
  perrito666 and I have been developing this at a rapid pace. So far we
  have something that's addable to the form and does a little bit of
  work. My end adds 0 of all the products in a given folder into the
  cart, and then the user might update their cart to select how many of
  each they want.
• Last I saw, perrito666 was working on pre-populating the PFG folder with the required GetPaid forms.
  

Ain't integration fun!? We hope so... Lots of talk recently about integration GetPaid with PloneFormGen (for flexible forms leading into transactions) and Salesforce.com (to write transaction data into the CRM). These have long been areas of interest in the community, and I wanted to point out a couple threads of conversation going on around these (yes, I have been instigating some discussion again...).

PloneFormGen + GetPaid = single page checkout

At least, we hope! Ever since the first release of getpaid, we realized that a flexible  donation/payment form making option was desired for GetPaid. We know that everyone wants their donation form slightly different, so an option like
PloneFormGen, which also has wide adoption in the community, seemed like  an obvious choice.

One/Northwest and others have worked on an adapter for mapping PFG data into salesfoce.com, which seems like a great model for this use case. This leverages the flexible form making and integrates it into another system for storing/manipulating what was collected in the form - brilliant! For more on
this, see this blog post.

The concept would be similar for Getpaid integration with PFG: map fields from a form into GetPaid cart and/or checkout process. Some potential use  cases:
  - Make a single page checkout (so you enter all on one page and that generates the order directly)
  - Ordering multiple items from a single page

See an example of both of these at: http://tinyurl.com/53yr8o

See and contribute to thread here.

Salesforce + GetPaid = tracking those customers

See and contribute to thread here

And one day...maybe there will be a GetPaid + PloneFormGen + Salesforce.com integration! Oh the bliss!!

We would  appreciate your ideas, feedback, questions, and offers to contribute :)