ecommerce

At last we have reduced the issues in the tracker, given the code some polish, fixed typos and added some improvements. Red Ochre has gone a ways beyond what we originally set out to do...providing additional features like Plone 3.0 compatibility, optional anonymous checkout, 2 additional payment processors, lots of languages and i18n work, and some example implementations. Supporting all these extra features has taken extra effort to get the release polished, but also been a great way to involve a much broader community of developers and integrators.

We made it to the release candidate thanks to some dedicated effort from Maurits over this past week to squash some remaining bugs and clean up the product. Then, Lucie swooped in at the last minute to take care of the remainder of issues yesterday! Wow, great work you all!! Thanks for helping get this ready!

Update on status:

• All tests are passing!
  
• Release Candidate tarball uploaded: Download it now! (484kb)
  
• Issue tracker: main thing left to do is prepare the code base (tags etc) for the release
  
• Our Ohloh reports seem to be broken, so I can't get new updates from there (request for updating made today). 
• There are a great many things to work on going forward, which have been organized in a page of proposals here. 
• If you find any issues with the current Release Candidate, please report them in the issue tracker and share any ideas, news, etc on our mailing list.
  

Latest changes in product:

• Put back on the last checkout page a check to see if the person is anonymous, and if the person is, we don't give a link to the order
• Added a check on the order view page to allow only manager and owner of the order to see the order, refs #157
  

And that's a wrap for today!

Please use the product and let us know how it goes! If you launch a site with GetPaid, please contact us so we can advertise it on our Sites that Use GetPaid page.

Thanks so much to  all those who helped make this possible - all our developers and supporters. Special thanks to our sponsors, who have contributed so much support to helping this become a reality:

ObjectRealms | ifPeople | One/Northwest | Contextual Corporation | Trees for Life | Totsie.com

Red Ochre release, now days away, is aimed at establishing a framework, and in the process, providing basic donation functionality. The framework part was heavy for this release...so lots of improvements have been suggested. One strong contingent for new features and improvements is from users who want to use GetPaid for online stories.

Liam has taken the initiative to draft an initial set of requirements and proposals for store features. I filled it in with a lot of the improvements suggested by users via the issue tracker as well as some additional ideas and features.

Now we need your help again - can you help us refine and define the features to make GetPaid's store use case as strong as possible? We hope that you will help us prioritize the ideas and turn them into a detailed picture of how GetPaid will work as a store. Please check out http://code.google.com/p/getpaid/wiki/Store_Functionality_Proposals , where you can add comments, or discuss the proposals on our mailing list.

<cheerleader>Whadda we need? Deployments! Whendaweneed 'em? Now! </cheerleader>

The great thing about GetPaid reaching a stable state is that it is getting used! And that is creating lots of great effects:

• Bugs are getting found and fixed (thanks to Javimansilla, Lucielejard!)
• Extensions of the product are being created to give GetPaid new functionality
• Improvements are being integrated that make the core better.

This week we had great news about some of this additions, including:

• News of a French translation in the works by Lucie Lejard!
• The creation of a discounts extension by Lucie at Six Feet Up. Six Feet Up announced the project this week and the code is already in the public repository, though still in the works. Eventually it will be packaged as an extension for GetPaid.
  
• The email notifications system got improved once folks started finding out about using (and overriding it). Now it is easier to use your own templates for email notifications.
  
• New payment processor: in the works is integration with Paymentech, the Chase bank processor. Look out for getpaid.paymentech soon too...
  
• Additions of new documentation to the GetPaid documentation on plone.org

EasyShop is in the Plone collective and on a live site already.

EasyShop: A Plone 2.5 (with branch in 3.0) product for ecommerce store is already released as alpha and running live. The product includes archetypes for all content and Zope 3 interfaces, adapters, and views. It is in the process of being refactored for Plone 3.0. It is focused on stores (European), with ability to configure flexibly criteria for pricing, shipping, and taxes. Credit card payment is via PayPal and it also allows for manual processing (ie offline), with ability for the store manager to control the order workflow.

Browse the code in the collective

Visit the product on Plone.org

See the demo site

Description from the Plone Commerce Background page:

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!