Thread

Heya - I’m investigating EE for a bi-monthly magazine site, but one of the requirements is that they be able to sell subscriptions, and have that subscription grant access to all of the online magazine content.  Optionally as well, they’d like to have individual articles that are “premium” content available on an a-la-cart basis for a small fee.  Alongside selected articles that are free across the board.

So my questions would be:

1) Can the Simple Commerce module, using PayPal’s IPN, grant instant access to certain content (ie. bump a user from a “guest” to a “subscriber” role)?

2) Can users be granted granular permissions in this way (for example, reading an individual article)?

3) Can individual articles (weblog entries I suppose) be marked with certain permissions (ie. guests see only a teaser, subscribers see all of it)?

Thanks!
Derek

Hey! Welcome to our community. =)

1) Can the Simple Commerce module, using PayPal’s IPN, grant instant access to certain content (ie. bump a user from a “guest” to a “subscriber” role)?

Yes, it can do this. =)

2) Can users be granted granular permissions in this way (for example, reading an individual article)?

The way permissions are normally handled is in one of two ways.

* Access to an entire template based on membership group.
* Conditionals based off membership group or member ID, to restrict content to parts of a template.

Because you would normally use one template to serve all of your articles, this may be a bit tricky.  It is possible, but depending on if you really needed it to be “per article” and how your infrastructure is set up, it could have some parts that need some custom code. I think this part would need to be hashed out more, in terms of your end goals, to see the best way to handle it; but yes, it can be handled in EE.

3) Can individual articles (weblog entries I suppose) be marked with certain permissions (ie. guests see only a teaser, subscribers see all of it)?

Absolutely - very, very easily. 

Also, do not hesitate to have a look at our other support resources, as well as the video tutorials and getting started sections of the docs.  And of course, we always recommend trying before you buy. =)

1) Can the Simple Commerce module, using PayPal’s IPN, grant instant access to certain content (ie. bump a user from a “guest” to a “subscriber” role)?

Yes, it can do this. =)

 

I have two follow-up questions regarding the above:

1 - Can monthly, quarterly, etc pay periods be defined? For instance, charge $10 every month for 12 months?

2 - Can another payment gateway be hooked in besides paypal?

AFAIK, to both questions, the answer is “no” at the moment - not without heavy customizing. There were roumors about a fullblown e-commerce module in the past 18 months, but ElisLab doesn’t give any details about it and a possible release date. The SCM (Simple Commerce Module) is just that: simple - and limited to standard PayPal IPNs. Great for simple one-time payments, but reoccuring payments are more difficult to handle and beyond the scope of the SCM.

@ms
Thanks for the reply. Sounds like for now, I’ll have to write a custom module or plugin to make it do what I want. I figured as much but thought I’d ask before heading down this road.

I know some folks use aMember pro to handle that sort of subscription service w/EE.  It would be worth a look- though I haven’t played with it myself.

@Robin Sowell

That is interesting… I have looked at aMember pro before and I recall thinking that I wouldn’t need it as EE “seems” to do everything I wanted aMember pro to do in terms of member management (besides the recurring billing unfortunately). I suppose I’ll have to revisit.

Thanks for chiming in.

I’ve revisited aMember and have found it should be suitable. Alternatively, I’ve found PayPal Payments Pro 2.0 + their recurring subscriptions service is another good option.