alpha

GetPaid's second major release, this one provides complete fulfillment and shipping functionality as well as several enhancements to the base product, such as address book, warehouse and inventory management, reports, and UPS shipping calculator integration. This version supports Plone 2.5 and Plone 3.0. Hopefully it will also get the Discount product included as well.

Where are we today?

Lots of changes have been going on (see the older blog posts for a summary) and great new features, especially around fulfillment and shipping.  Basically, to the solid framework established in the Red Ochre release (0.3), we have built out fulfillment functionality quite extensively.

Ohloh reports us as having over 10,000 lines of code now!

What next?

Next week, probably, we will make our release branch of the code. There will be some complexity around making tarballs that work, so expect them a while later.

We still have several issues that are targeted at this release.

We also need a catchy code name for this release :)

One thing to note...this will be our last release supporting Plone 2.5, unless someone new steps up to do the maintenance on that part of the code. The future release (0.9) will probably be lots of cleaning and UI improvements, plus the new features people think up to include :)

If you have suggestions for things you would like to see, please send comments to our dev mailing list.

After a lot of design and development work at the sprint, Kapil is leading the charge to prepare the Red Ochre release!

Since the sprint, there has been a lot of refactoring. What does that mean? Well, for one, the product is getting a LOT better! But what that means that impacts you...is that we need your help testing.

The product is now available in a more traditional Plone product way - just download a tarball and stick in your Products directory, restart Zope and see how it goes! (for more on the issues with buildout see dev list message). Get the latest tarball from our Google Code downloads section (The Friday the 13th version is here).

You should be able to:

• Install it to your site
• Go to product config area and: Configure it for donations, shippable products, etc
• View order history, search them
• Note: to do this, you will probably want to generate test orders using the script included in the product.
  
• Go to content in your site and make it "buyable" or "a donation" from the actions menu
• Set the price etc
• Browse the site and when on buyable content, be able to add to cart
• Review your cart
• Checkout (fill out info for the order)
• View your order history
• Get Paid!

We couldn't have done it without you! Thanks to all who have contributed to this project and supported our efforts.

Project Advocate

Project Supporter

One/Northwest, Contextual Corporation, Trees for Life

Community Supporter

Totsie.com

Other support:

SixFeetUp, LLC

John Habermann

Micheal Beck

For your planning:

• Next week we will be ready for alpha testers! (and you should be able to
  complete a checkout)
  
• In two weeks (June 6), we will have a followup call to talk about the
  testing, new development, and planning for Google sprint (same time as
  today's call).
  

Also, don't forget that we are in the process of our Red Ochre release
fundraising! Please check out www.plonegetpaid.com/sponsor to make a
contribution!

Check out the updates below. If you have any questions, please ask!

Cheers,
Chris
--
GetPaid Dev Update Call
May 23, 2007

Attendees: Alex (aclark), Kapil (hazmat), Richard (fifer), Scott (spaleyAE),
Jon (jonstahl), Chris (cjj)

Update:

Develoment is in a rapid pace of change now

Infrastructure over last week

• marking content as "payable" and being able to edit amount
• shopping cart that you can add things to (all viewlet based)
• integration of ore.member for adding fields to member

Next:

• Order management facility (in process), track orders and payment process info
• Pay processor integration (troubles getting authorize.net dev account; Scott and Kapil to connect about that)
• zope 3 workflow engine being used for checkout

By next week should have ability to complete checkout process.
Next week we will need alpha testers!

Then: Support for users to look at orders

Goals:

• Will be able to store all ecommerce data in relational db (to make it

easier for reporting systems tie in). Because of this, the bundle includes
some things for testing that won't be part of the first release.

Q/A:

• Scott asks about donation management (forms to make donation in predetermined amounts for a given program/sub-organization). Would need to set dropdown of prices, ideally, and possibly have open field for price also.
• Other use cases: workflow change on payment will be deferred till Google sprint.
• Delivery through the web use case has several complexities around changing
  security settings on an object and has been deferred for now. 
• SSL use in commerce systems is ubiquitous. Though we can't necessarily
  enforce it in the product, we should explain (or link to doc on plone.org)
  it in master README; perhaps we need to configure SSL in admin screens.
  
• Trust Commerce (payment processor) product published by Tres (link from
  the payment processors page in the wiki).
  

Show me the code!

This past week, Kapil took on GetPaid head on and has been making great progress  towards the Red Ochre release! An excerpt:

 from the admin screens you can now activate content types to
 be available as buyable, shippable. the admin pages have also
 switched out to a set of tabbed views from a single view.

 from within the plone ui navigation, for content types configured
 for it within the admin screens, you can enable an individual
 piece of content to be one purchasble, and edit its purchase settings.

Read complete update email. The latest also includes work on the shopping cart. If you want to grab the code and check it out, check out the easy process thanks to the use of zc.building! The Getting Start doc explains it all.

For those of you anxious for the latest news, we will have a conference call this Wednesday, May 23 at 1pm Eastern for an update on the product's development. Please join us! Dial in to 605-725-3600 with access code 69812 .

Social Source Fundraising

We realize that commerce is a serious need in Plone's toolkit. We have all been waiting for it to just “emerge” from the community, but unfortunately, it hasn't yet. So...we decided to fast-track that by going beyond the volunteer efforts at sprints to actually fund development. Just as Open Source relies on a group of individuals to contribute to the whole, our “social source” funding model relies on individuals, organizations, and businesses in the community to contribute the pieces that make funding possible.

You can see to the right our ChipIn widget on the fundraising. Our “Red Ochre” Release has a cost of $7,500, of which we have secured $4,500 from sponsors already. Now we are pursuing more community contributions to raise the remaining funds. If you would like to be a sponsor or make a contribution, please check out our Sponsorship page. Thanks to Jon Stahl for getting out our fundraising letter to Plone users list.

Sponsors include:

• ifPeople
• Object Realms
• One/Northwest
• Contextual Corporation
• Totsie.com

Red Ochre Release Scheduled for June 1

The first release of our product, GetPaid, will happen June 1, 2007. This represents a lot of work to get the architecture down and workable. The initial product will be able to make content payable and process a payment (using the Authorize.net processor). This release will include:

• Administrative screens
• Quick Install
  
• Setup of pay processor (a tab in product interface)
  
• "Payable" content
  
• Ability to make any content payable
• Donations handling (form to take donations)
• Example of pay processing content workflow integration
  
• Payment processor
  
• Authorize.net pay processor integration
  
• A shopping cart
• Checkout
  
• Registration/authentication 

Sponsors Needed

GetPaid is a well-organized project seeking to provide reliable, useful releases. Rather than relying on all volunteers, we are funding the development of this open source product to ensure that it moves along successfully. We offer many options for sponsorship, but any and all contributions are welcome! If you want to make a contribution, please see information about sponsorship and how to make a contribution.

If you have any quesitons, please contact us.

What does the release name mean?

"Red Ochre" is the nickname for this release. Red Ochre was chosen because it is one of the earliest forms of money used (see wikipedia info), approximately 100,000 years ago. Since this is our first release, we are emerging. We chose the early symbol of money to relate to this release.