Thread

I’m using EE on one project right now for a client, but am considering it for another project as well. I need some information on a few issues before deciding whether or not it will work for the second project.

1 - I see that the forums can be integrated with the blogs to handle replies/comments on a plog post in a forum thread. How difficult is that to set up? Is it something that is done on a template level, or on the administration end, or is it something that must be set within each blog post?

2 - We need to have two levels of membership, one which is free and allows the users to comment on publicly viewable content, and a second which is a paid subscription access. Is there some subscription system available that handles letting the administrators set up a couple of different subscription types, and then handles sending out notice to the subscribers when it’s time to renew, and moves a non-renewing subscriber back to the public membership group if they don’t renew? (Basically something along the lines of the subscriptions available with vBulletin.)

3 - How difficult would it be to have content be available to only paid subscribers for a set amount of time (for example 2 weeks), and after it has been up for that time frame it shifts to being publicly available to anyone? We’re looking to have new content be viewable only by subscribers for a period of time, after which it becomes viewable by anyone.

Thanks!

1.  Really is simple.  Basically- once the forum is installed, you’ll get an extra ‘Forum’ tab on the publish/edit page- where you can specify what you want to go in the forum post that’s linked to that article- see the docs to get a feel for it.  And there’s an extension around that will automate it, if you don’t want to manually enter the text for the forum.  Then- to link to the forum topic instead of using comments, you can use the {forum_topic_id} variable inside the weblog tag to create the link.  The EE Blog uses this approach, if you want to see it in action.

2.  Controlling access by member level will be easy- managing subscriptions will take customization or a third party add-on.  You could use the simple commerce module for a one time subscription fee- it can change membership level based on a successful paypal payment.  However, it won’t work for continuing subscriptions requiring renewal and such.  Though you could use it as a base to start customizing.  As an alternative, I know folks have used aMember membership software (commercial) with EE.

3.  While it’s not entirely ‘out of the box’ it would be easy enough to do.  I can think of different ways to approach it, but I lean toward using a custom status to determine whether or not data should be protected.  If that’s the way you go?  You’d want to write a cron job that alters the status to ‘open’ or whatever for all entry dates more than 2 weeks old- or whatever.  Wouldn’t be hard- could either do a ‘true cron’ on the server level or a ‘fake cron’ and use the EE Cron.  But overall?  Wouldn’t be hard with just a wee bit of coding skill.

In short- it all sounds doable to me- the biggest issue is going to be the subscription manager, which will definitely need to be custom.

ETA- just a note.  While it IS easy to limit what folks can access on a per forum basis according to membership level?  If you needed to make some posts ‘switch’ after 2 weeks or something?  That would be trickier than doing it with the weblog posts themselves.  I’d have to think on that a bit.

Thanks for the info. The subscription thing and being able to have content move from private to public are the two key features we need, and at least one of them needs to work without too much hassle from administrators. 😉 I can probably convince admins that they need to do some of that work, but not all of it…hehe. Unfortunately, the budget constraints on this one mean that requiring the purchase of aMember on top of everything else is probably out of the question.

The sad reality on this project is that vBulletin seems to have the most of the requirements met “out of the box”. But it’s a forum software, not a CMS, and none of us are all that thrilled with the prospect of running it as a forum.