Thread

Hi everyone,

I’m pretty new to EE but have been learning fast and really enjoying it. I have redone my own website in EE and will be launching it as soon as all the content has been added. Sneak peak here: http://www.tricycle.ie/v2/

Anyway I am starting a new project and would like to see if you think EE is a suitable platform to use. Basically the site will provide legal advice for a small fee.

The basic process is:

1. User creates an account.
2. User logs in and creates a question.
3. Question is paid for using Paypal.
4. Answer appears in their account within 24hrs (with notification by email).

If anyone could advise me on how I should go about doing this or if EE is even the right thing to use I’d be very grateful.

An overwhelming response!

Anyway I decided to go with a Membrr module to handle payments. I’ll post again when I have something to show.

Membrr is good, I’ve used it. Did you look into using the Simple Commerce Module?

Hi Leeaston,

I did look into it but I don’t think it will do the job for me. I want to be able to change the status of an entry once payment has been verified. As far as I can tell the Simple Commerce module only allows you to change a users member group. This is more suitable for say a subscription I think. What I’m doing is more like a paid listing which Membrr should be able to do easily.

But by all means tell me I’m wrong and save me €145 😊

Why don’t you use the member group (authors) to control display of entries?

1. User creates account and gets put into “pending members” member group

2. User posts a question it’s status is already “Open”, but your channel entries don’t display posts from “pending” members, only “paid” members.

3. User pays, EE changes member group to “paid members”, and your channel entries then displays the post

Yes I had thought of that but then what do you do if the user adds another question? They will already be in the “paid members” group so further entries/questions will display automatically not requiring payment. As such I think control needs to be over the specific entry and not the user.

What you think?

Hi,

Yeah it’s a bit difficult. I think I will use the Membrr module and turn it more into a subscription based model. But my latest thoughts on it are:

1. User creates an account.
2. User creates a channel entry which is assigned a status of pending.
3. User then visits PayPal to pay and passes the entry_id within the URL (I think that’s possible).
4. PayPal redirects back to site to a confirmation page again passing the entry_id.
5. The confirmation page uses a plugin called External Entries to update the entry status to paid.

The only two problems I’m working on with that are, passing the entry_id to PayPal and back again. And the External Entries plugin using the entry_id.

P

Cool, I’m very interested in this method. However, personally I’m not an advanced enough user to know whether it would work or not.

I do think that for my needs Membrr is overkill so I would really like to use Simple Commerce. I am still designing the site so there is still time to choose either.

Maybe someone from Ellis Lab could comment on whether this is possible or not?

I’ve just been playing around with it. The trouble I am having is the PayPal part. I don’t have much of an idea when it comes to PayPal variables etc and reading the docs hasn’t helped.

Perhaps someone could help.

I simply have a Buy Now button, I am using a hidden field to pass the item_number the entry_id. I am then hoping PayPal can pass that back to me upon confirmation.

I have no idea how to retrieve it though, is it stored in a php POST array? If so how do I get at it in my template?

P

I’ve installed Membrr and Opengateway. It was relatively straightforward.

Channel Protection seems to be the way forward for my situation.

http://www.membrr.com/docs/channel_protection

A member won’t be able to create a question until they have paid and are given access to the Question Channel. You can limit the member to one post per ‘subscription’.

In this situation a subscription is a single transaction and doesn’t repeat so a member would have to create another subscription to ask another question. The word subscription obviously makes more sense when using Membrr for more standard purposes rather than single transactions!

If Carthrob was EE2 ready it would probably be a more suitable option.