I was building my sight, working on some of the functionality, when it dawned on me I might be overstepping an EE licensing restriction so I thought I aught to explain in some detail what exactly I’m doing as to reach a clear understanding of pmachine’s stance on this.
I have read about the license restrictions, and have even posted questions about them some time ago.
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/38593/
This was in regards to having a few blogs on my site related to my websites niche authored by volunteer staff members. As there would only be a few authors and writing a blog wouldn’t be open to everyone is was clear from the discussion I was not in danger of crossing a licensing restrictions.
There is another piece of functionality I also want to be clear about. The restriction in question is “Use the Software as the basis of a hosted weblogging service, or to provide hosting services to others.” again.
Here’s the scoop:
My site is dedicated to the niche of pet tarantulas. The functionality in question is what I call “dealer listings”. This functionality would allow tarantula (and possibly other invertebrate) dealers to sign up with me (for free if that has any bearing) and list there tarantulas for sale. A glorified “tarantulas for sale” classifieds if you will. (Believe it or not tarantula dealers will overnight ship you a tarantula, it is generally considered more ethical than buying from a pet store which are mostly wild caught tarantulas vs captive bred spiders from online dealers.)
The dealer will also get a single page (they will not be able to customize this) with his/her business info and a list of only his/her tarantulas for sale. No e-commerce functionality, of course, as I only list their offerings, again like the classifieds. The way I have technically set this up is each listing will be a weblog entry into a “tarantula dealer listings” weblog. This will be a single weblog and permissions will be separated by means of categories. (Go EE 1.6!) Not sure yet if the individual dealer pages will be a single (shared) weblog or just a template outputting member (dealer) custom fields. While there will not be automated sign-up like for standard members who just want to post to forum, post comments, add to wiki, etc. as I will have to approve them then manually switch them for “standard” member to dealer, but I had intended to let most good standing dealers sign-up. This may end up being quite a few. They will then be allowed to maintain there listings (or there category of the dealer listings weblog) through stand-alone forms (no control panel access). While this is not a live-journal clone (an example given to me before as an licensing overstep) in a manner of speaking you could say this section of my site is a crude “hosted weblogging service” because my dealer listings and dealer informational pages technically are an EE weblogs that the dealers will be able to control (just their own, of course).
So how does this stand up to the intentions of the licensing restrictions?