Bursar nearing release, plus new library splits

[Bruce Kroeze]

Bursar is getting nearer and nearer to its first release.

At this point, I'm done converting the payment gateways for:

authorizenet
autosuccess
cod
cybersource
dummy
purchase order
paypal
protx

They all work perfectly with Satchmo, and have significantly more
tests, both on the Bursar side and the Satchmo side.

I've also enhanced the PayPal module. It can now do encrypted forms
automatically, if you configure your certs and install M2Crypto. In
addition, I've added a development-only view which allows you to test
IPN responses from your local development machine - which often are
inaccessible to the paypal servers. Lastly, I think PayPal
subscriptions should now work properly. I doubt they were working
before.

Last night, I removed the last bits of Satchmo dependency. Bursar is
now completely standalone, needing absolutely no libraries (except for
M2Crypto if you want encrypted PayPal forms).

Also, I've split out the Satchmo libraries "livesettings" and
"keyedcache" to new projects. I know they are already being used in
other non-Satchmo projects, so this is a good time to do that.
Accomplishing that was actually almost trivial, due to the refactoring
work we did last year. Since we are keeping the same library names,
this will be a "transparent replacement" with no configuration needed
at all, just installation of standalone libraries:
http://bitbucket.org/bkroeze/django-keyedcache/
http://bitbucket.org/bkroeze/django-livesettings/

If you contributed to either of these libraries, please let me know
and I'll add you to the appropriate AUTHORS file.

While testing, I found that I needed some new capabilities in
Livesettings, so I added them to the new django-livesettings project.
Config items can now have callbacks which can do arbitrary validation
before accepting an update, and can also have a callback which gets
fired on update. One use-case this will enable is to allow Satchmo
stores to avoid the awkward and hard to diagnose errors where it is
expecting a filename to refer to an existing file. The configuration
item can check for the file's presence and throw a validation error if
it is not there.

Note that I will not be back-porting any of these changes to the
payment system, livesettings, or keyedcache.

I've got a heavy week of client work ahead of me, so I can't wrap
things up just yet on Bursar, but we are getting very close.

--
Bruce Kroeze
http://www.ecomsmith.com
It's time to hammer your site into shape.

[Erik Allik]

Hey!

The whole Bursar and decoupling seems like a very cool thing and in my
opinion could make Satchmo more popular. I've been thinking though:
how much effort would it be to develop a simple plugin/extensions
system for Satchmo similar to what Magento has? With Magento you can
download and install prepackaged extensions to a running Magento site
using Magento Connect, and this is one of the features that has made
Magento so popular.

Also this could be something that could later be decoupled and used
with any Django site.

Just wondering.

Regards,
Erik Allik

[Chris Moffitt]

It's great to hear that the project is moving along so quickly. Since it seems like this is the way to go for payment modules, I went ahead and moved some tickets from Satchmo to Bursar. They each contain a patch of some sort to integrate a new payment module. I don't expect them to get implemented but I figure moving them to Bursar makes it more likely that someone else will find it and start doing their own thing to improve and update them.

-Chris