EC maintainer seeks: non-smoker, likes bushwalking and ...

Hi there

I'm trying to locate developers (any skill level is ok) who have the same E-Commerce focus that I do. The idea is that I am available for feedback, reviews, advice, escalation, and even tuition. Yes, tuition, which means I'm happy for this to be a mentor arrangement (which is why I've posted to Dojo).

The problem with developing for E-Commerce is a) we are not giving out CVS access and b) patches in the queue can be painfully slow to commit. We already have 5 maintainers. So the challenge is to have patches committed promptly by one of the maintainers. I can do this, as long as the patches are for areas that I am familiar with.

What do I want from you?

• Be active in #drupal-ecommerce on freenode.
• Take on tasks based on the categories below
• (If you are a Drupal newbie) have a working knowledge of PHP

What do you get from me?

Obviously, the outcomes will be different depending on your experience level.

• I'll walk you through code, EC/Drupal, and answer questions as required.
• (If needed), I'll help you checkout code and make patches.
• I'll review, test and commit your patches.
• Repartee and banter.

Below is a summary of my areas of interest. It's important that you are interested in developing these areas of E-Commerce. Otherwise, I don't have the expertise to process your patches.

EC 5

Sexy, huh? I'm primarily working on EC5. All of the code I describe below is for EC5.

State/Country

Much of the hard-coded state/country lists are now removed from store.module. To start, this means you can have state lists (for more than one country) in a separate file. OK, so no-one likes hacking files, but at least we don't have to hack store.module anymore. Also, there is optional support for Location to provide states and countries. This is a precursor to asking Location to calculate shipping distances between postcodes for shipping charges based on distance.

Regions

I've put a new module in EC5 called ec_region. This modules allow admins to group geographic areas together into "regions" or "zones". Then other modules can request regional data based on the address of the customer. There is a goal to use this for things like tax, but in the short term it's to support the following.

Simple shipping

A big problem for people in 4.7 was simple shipping, and one that I was supposed to fix, but hey. I've committed simple shipping code for EC5 as an include for Flexicharge. This further defines the difference between shipcalc and flexicharge: shipcalc supports interaction with external shipping providers, flexicharge is internal. So the flexicharge shipping provider will allow the admin to group countries and states into regions so that fixed fees can be allocated based on weight and destination.

Flexicharge

It's been a long-standing aim to actually put some more providers into Flexicharge. Initially the goal was to add them as I've used them, but hence the problem with focus. Really, it shouldn't be a big deal to add a few more useful charges like "charge by role", or "charge by user name multiplied by moon phase".

Other stuff

I'm familiar more or less with some other stuff, like file.module and auction.module - auction could handle a lot more coolness IMO.

What I don't do

Well, there's a whole bunch of stuff that I know very little about: cart, payment, donate, invoice, subproducts, coupon, apparel, payment gateways, shipcalc (except Austpost at a pinch) and lots of other bits that I don't remember already.

Look forward to people's questions.

Don't contact me privately. Ask questions here to start with.

Thanks,
Simon