shipping

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.

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 :)

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!
  

It's great to see we are almost at 300 downloads for the GetPaid RC1! So far just one small bug in that file so far so expect a final shortly. Already, new work has started on the trunk and in some of the branches, so I wanted to give a quick update about two exciting pieces.

Google Checkout Integration

Thanks to Michael Dunstan, a simple integration of Google Checkout now exists for GetPaid! That gets your order straight into Google Checkout so you can use their infrastructure for fulfillment and order management. See screenshot of order management interface.

This is good news for US non-profit organizations, as Google is offering GoogleCheckout for free (at least through end of this year). That means no processing fees, monthly fees etc to accept donations online!

Still pending is a smooth buildout experience to get the feature, but if you are interested, check here to check out the product (especially README!).

More sophisticated integration (ie getting messages back to GetPaid from Google Checkout) requires an SSL certificate and secure communications with the Plone site.

UPS Shipping Integration

Liam started off UPS integration and Kapil has refactored it, including unit tests and more. Now shipping costs can be looked up in real time from your GetPaid site. The work is currently happening in the UPS branch of the code, but will be rolled into the trunk and available tomorrow.

Some other goodies in the work include persistent shopping cart, ability to print order, and more!