changelog

The CIA bot dumped a long list of checkin updates into #getpaid yesterday afternoon, and remarkably we passed our 2000th revision! In that swirl of code, paypal workings got fixed thanks to duffyd, some error controls and bug fixes to the getpaid.report component were added (and perrito666 hit the 2000 milestone!), googlecheckout got updated by dunny, and more. See changelog.

Thanks to all who have been working on the project!

Other noteables from GetPaid:

• GetPaid 0.6.1 tarball now has 895 downloads and has surpassed the 0.3 downloads total!

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.
  

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:

Ricardo has been helping us to clean up issues and we are down to 10 listed in the tracker, with several of those actually falling into the "continuous enhancement" category, as opposed to blockers or priority items for this release.

Here's a quick look at progress towards the 0.6 release and an update on the release.

• We are over 620 downloads of the 0.3 release tarball! (plus buildout usage)
• A bug got fixed in the 0.3 buildout branch this past week
• Several bugs got fixed in the trunk, including restored Plone 2.5 compatibility for the buildout, report-related bugs, template changes, and more.  Also, a tool got added to extract email addresses from customer records. Check out the change logs to see more.
  
• We are down to 14 issues tagged for M2 (actually less once we verify closure...). See the issues and grab one to fix or test!
  
• The 0.6 release branch will be made later this week. If you have goodies to include or bugs to fix, please do them asap!
  

Thanks for tuning in. Grab an issue, test the tools, and let us know how it looks so we can make way for 0.6 :)

What a busy month! I think I have missed about 150 revisions since the last update, so here goes an attempt to catch up...to get the latest, grab our buildout (see documentation here).

Some stats:

• Over 500 downloads of our last stable release!
• A good number of tests going into new products!
• There are now LOTS of open issues (68, actually) in the tracker, which includes lots of change/improvement requests also. If you want to help out please take 'em on!
  

Highlights of what is in the latest code now:

• UPS shipping support. Still don't quite understand it (some configuration magic that has to happen), but there has been a LOT of work to get this going. Thanks to Kapil, Liam, Perrito and others for working, reworking, and fixing this.
  
• Shipping setup: this got refactored to be a bit cleaner and have some nice viewlets. Makes it easy to add in multiple shipping methods as we grow.
  
• Inventory management: Yes!!! getpaid.warehouse now available. This is a rather recent addition (you can only find it now by adding @@inventory to the URL), but it is there! Checkouts change the quantity, there is the ability to add warehouses for a site. More goodies to come as the work is rounded out by Kapil. Nicely done!
• Address book: Thanks to a use case we had for an ifPeople client, we built a means of saving shipping addresses in your profile during checkout, which are then accessible in checkout.
  
• Auto-loading your details: get tired of typing same details into the screen? Now they get autoloaded! Go lazy programmers!!
• Order templates: reordering your viagra supply ever couple months? Now you can save time in checkout by loading your orders from your past orders!
• Shipping price wired into total price: Now when you select shipping service, it will be added to the total price in the cart/checkout. 
• SSL: Now, by default, the site wants SSL. If you are just testing, you need to deactivate this in the GetPaid setup area for checkout to work. 
• Checkout wizard refactoring: after a significant refactoring, it got some fixes and improvements and additional testing.
  
• Relational database: there is also a relational database implementation of getpaid.core (called getpaid.rdb).
  

• PayPal processor interface!!! No really...I am serious! daMaestro told me in #getpaid just now :)
• PXPay processor: The Kiwis finally have their chance at GetPaid too! Apparently Winterhouse Consulting has done an implementation of this pay processor from Payment Express.
  
• Authorize.net recurring payments: ifPeople has also done integration with of the Automatic Recurring Billing (ARB) service of authorize.net. Currently in a branch...
• A new release: no details...but probably will be associated with a shipping wrap up. Possibly in late April.
  
• More sites using GetPaid!

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 :)

There has been a lot of work going on a branch called "kapil-dev", which includes shipping with UPS, an address book available in checkout, and a checkout wizard refactoring. Two main changes:

• the store settings are no longer stored in an adapter,  instead there in a utility. It's backwards compatible though for access, ie there is an adapter that retrieves the utility. and there is a migration step in place if you go the upgrade tool. Previous settings will work till then.
• the checkout wizard has been refactored in an attempt to make it more customizable. which is in getpaid.wizard. There are separate controllers (sequence of steps ), data managers ( manage all the data in the forms) and steps no longer have to get hardcoded to their order of execution. If you have made programmatic changes to the wizard, you will need to make changes to accomodate the new code. If you override the checkout entirely with your customizations, your changes should be fine.
  

These changes represent some great new features for GetPaid, yet also mean that the code base is going to change in some significant pieces...so there is going to be a transition that requires attention (note: this is vital for anyone running their site from buildout on the trunk of the product; if you are using the tarball or the RedOchre release branch (0.3), then you don't need to pay attention to this). 

If you are running off the trunk, then the next time you update the code base, you will need to perform a migration to fix some of the changes. The "upgrade" screen in GetPaid setup area will be helpful in this - just hit the upgrade button and your site will be fixed!

Check out...

• GetPaid dev list now available via Gmane! For those of you who like your mailing lists in an exciting text format ;), you can now find our development mailing list available via Gmane: http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.zope.plone.getpaid.devel  Thanks to Suno (meandtheshell) for setting that up!
• Buildout updated to use latest Plone 3: now you get a shiny new version of Plone 3.0.5 (or whatever the latest Plone is) when you run buildout. This is also true in the anonymous buildout.
  

In the works

• Taxes! Yes, there is a needs for (US) tax handling. So yesterday kicked off a big discussion on implementation handling. Are you interested in having a say on taxes too? Please join our development mailing list and let others know! Shortly there will be user stories on this. More developers desired to contribute!
  
• Shipping, checkout refactoring, and persistent address book: All in place on Kapil's branch, he is planning to circulate a writeup about the changes and request review (though take a look now if you want the sneak peak!).
  

Coming soon

• Inventory and warehouse management: need to keep track of stock on items in your store? Track which warehouse a product is in and where in there it is? This work should be getting underway next week. Check out the user story on inventory/warehouse management.
  

Product stats:

• Exactly 350 downloads of our RedOchre 0.3 RC!
  

Now in the code:

• UK processor: As I was reminded today, Google Checkout supports UK and US merchants, so enjoy blokes!
• Printing: Emanuel checked in integration of "print" options a la Plone for the interfaces for orders, order details, and order confirmation!
  

In the works:

• Checkout refactoring: Kapil is experimenting with a new way to make the checkout screens very flexible!
• Multiple currency management: Very early planning stages for managing multiple currencies in GetPaid! Look for user stories for review coming soon.
  
• Address book management: Want to be able to ship to multiple people? You will be able to save your addresses in an address book and use them on checkout.
  
• Discounts: still looking for some help to get this incorporated properly. Got eggs?
  

Desired features looking for developers:

• Payment processors:
  
• PayPal
• usaePay
• PloneFormGen adapter: imagine making flexible forms that tie into GetPaid seemlessly! 
• UI integrators: the address book work is done in the backend but needs some integration work for UI, including javascript/ajax goodness.