(compiled and edited by Chris Johnson, ifPeople)

Happy Birthday, GetPaid!

Live from e, the 29th of June 2007, born was one GetPaid, child of Plone and Community. The excited parents were gathered around a room accented with blue, red, yellow, and green chairs. They shared in the joy of seeing their combined contributions resulted in something amazing: Plone and Community had just given birth to a commerce system!

Time of birth: doccomm Plone Sprint, Day 5, Summer
Place of birth: e <photo>, GooglePlex, Mountain View, CA
Given name: GetPaid
Family name: Plone
Weight at birth: 1.5 Mb
Delivery method: buildout

GetPaid's approach to ecommerce is to be (a) useful out of the box and (b) flexible (find more at www.plonegetpaid.com). This approach reflects the value that Plone itself provides: a full feature set that can easily be deployed complemented by a flexible system that can be customized and extended for particular use cases. The use cases targeted for the current release included basic donation processing and simple stores.

GetPaid provides the tools needed to easily integrate those features into a site: a cart, checkout, workflow, payment processor integration, administrative screens, and end user interface. At the DocComm sprint, held at Google June 25-29, over a dozen people contributed to the features that now make up GetPaid. In addition to the front-end features, the sprinters created a testing framework and created an entire set of test scripts to ensure quality now and in the future.

Led by Kapil Thengavelu, core Plone committer and author of many products for Plone and Zope, the sprinters worked together pair programming towards the goal of the week: getting paid! The group generated ideas and implemented side by side; they also created, tracked and closed issues (with the help of a remote sprinter from Argentina) on the project's Google Code are: code.google.com/p/getpaid . Each day twenty people would gather in our instant messaging channel on IRC (#getpaid) to follow what was going on, rallying the sprinters, and ask questions. The sprinters and organizers - all volunteers - were hosted and fed by Google, fueled by Guayaki yerba mate, and supported by several sponsors from the community who made the event possible.

Among the accomplishments of the week for GetPaid:
- an elegant framework thanks to Kapil's architecting
- Integrate three payment processors (Authorize.net, GoogleCheckout, PayPal)
- Create a shopping cart and means of adding items to it
- Refine the means designating content as "payable"
- Provide a working delivery method for the product (via buildout/ploneout) for technical users to quickly get set up
- Integrate user information collection and registration into the checkout process
- Order management interface to track both site-wide transactions (and status) as well as to provide end users a view of their own transactions
- Shipping functionality via integration of UPS
- Tests! Unit, doc, and functional tests

The future looks bright for this newborn! GetPaid still has a lot of work to be a complete system, but is near the point of its first release. Next on the horizon is:
- A remote sprint (continuing energy of the sprint at Google)
- Documentation of API and roadmap
- Set up demo site with latest version of products
- Clean up integration of workflow and payment processors
- Organize additional developers and funding to build out for specific use cases of "premium content", "pay to submit", and advanced store features.

The Recipe: Beans and Rice

For those who are interested in more technical information...check the directory where your buildout ran and meet getpaid.core and PloneGetPaid. They are designed to work together a system that, architecturally speaking ties us to CMF, but that is built in Zope 3 (and then bridged back to run in Zope 2 by Five). The product getpaid.core is a pure Zope product, while PloneGetPaid provides Plone integration and configuration.

The approach to integrating with a site is to provide the ability to make any content in a Plone site "payable" by providing a "marker interface". This trick, inspired by the Plone4Artists project, allows GetPaid to add to the site without actually changing the existing content. The system is built using Zope 3 technologies for adapters so that it can easily be adapted for custom storage of data (for example, using relational database for the store). This opens possibilities for integration with other enterprise systems, advanced reporting, and even making multiple stores per site! Check out code.google.com/p/getpaid for more on the product and its use.

Where get paid goes from now?

<geek>Eggs Don't Care!</geek>

The future of GetPaid largely depends on the adaptation and extension of the system by the community itself. The architecture and pending work on documentation and roadmap will provide a foundation for contributions. The sprint was an important step in getting new people into the code and working with the product. What's next? Well, we will have to see - maybe you want to be a part of that! Visit www.plonegetpaid.com and get connected!