Affiliate module for Drupal Commerce

I've never used the uc_affiliate module before, can you please tell us a bit about where the module is right now and where you'd like to see it after the SoC? I think there's a very good chance that Drupal Commerce will be ready in time for GSoC, but you may want to propose it in a way that doesn't limit you to that module's availability. Besides simply porting it, you say there are other features you'd want for the module (or a new architecture?), so I'd focus primarily on those items, with the intention of building it for D7 Drupal commerce, but with the option to build it for ubercart if it isn't ready.

Also- please ignore the Knight Initiative stuff- I have to figure out a way to turn that off, it's not really meant to be used for our proposals (though it doesn't harm them it does make it very confusing.

Hi,
I'm finishing a project and preparing some exams, so my online presence is suffering a bit.

The current module is "good-enough" for most use cases.

It has:
User and role based tracking.
Multiple commission levels, also available per role and per product.
Fixed-rate and percentage commissions.
Ability to add cookies so that affiliates get credit for return visits even though they didn't go through original affiliate link.
Token and Conditional Actions integration.
The ability for the admin to see all commissions on an order, and add/delete commissions manually.
The ability for the admin to see monthly sale&commission reports, and note down how much the affiliate has been paid.
Affiliate dashboard providing statistics (sales/commissions reports), affiliate link generating (image and text product links)

It's used in a decent number of sites, tested and used with both mysql and postgresql.
The code has recently been cleaned up.

This is why I would like to propose the new Affiliate module for Drupal Commerce only, the existing Ubercart implementation is nice enough and can be improved along the way (and ported to Ubercart for Drupal 7).
I've recently found a co-maintainer and users provide a steady influx of patches.

The new module should be a step beyond that.
The current module is a product of my limited free time, and others enthusiasm and patches.
This means no documentation, no unit-tests, and a limited user interface that doesn't really win any awards (it has been assembled piece by piece, not designed).

The current module has the features and the code, the new one should have a much improved interface.
The interface needs to better handle more complex use cases that have surfaced, while still handling the simple use cases nicely.

Right now the payment support is almost non-existant (a basic improvement proposal is here: http://drupal.org/node/715456, and I'm willing to consider some form of PayPal integration), the views integration is non-existent, the statistics screen is basic.
Tracking a large number of affiliates (divided into groups) is hard.

Those are my first thoughts, I will have a more defined improvement plan in the next few days.

I'd be happy to mentor on this one. It's little known, but I actually developed a custom affiliate system for a client on Ubercart 2.x as well, so I'm quite familiar with the needs and difficulties. We actually implemented multi-level affiliates and checkout white-labeling through the system as well, though I'd see those as far from "required" features.

I think Drupal Commerce will be far enough along for affiliates to make sense, mostly because an affiliate module doesn't need to concern itself overly much with the e-commerce integration. It's mostly a separate system with a little bit of tie-in through the checkout form. Beyond that, you're simply doing lead tracking, user relationships, transaction logging, affiliate reports, etc.

Targeting Drupal Commerce, we're already depending on Views and Rules 2 instead of Conditional Actions, and of course core has Token support now (a huge win, imo). I think a sufficient proposal can examine the basic affiliate requirements, translate those into these existing components, rough out the data model and displays, and then propose points of integration with the Commerce modules themselves. I bet you could end up with an affiliate module that is flexible enough to be used for managing referral bonuses based on Commerce transactions or even more simply as awarding User Points or establishing User Relations through affiliate sign-ups (i.e. on sites that aren't running Commerce). Obviously, targeting Commerce will bring you the quickest pool of users, testers, and contributors, so I think it's an essential part of the module's development.

I think 3 months is highly realistic, and I'm happy to be available as much as possible. Drupal Commerce is being developed on d.o, although we are using GitHub as our base repository and pushing commits from there to CVS on d.o. I don't think that goes against the spirit of webchick's post. Whatever comes of this project can easily be managed entirely through d.o, and I highly recommend seeing if you can take over http://drupal.org/project/affiliate for this development. (Last commit was December 2008.)

Please use the issue queue of the Ubercart Affiliate module for seeking help (I'd be glad to help), no need for us to spam this thread.

The affiliate module doesn't provide any contact forms, so you will need an additional module to do that.