Thread

Hello,

We have been searching hi and low for a system that can drip
feed as we call it to our customers. Here is the scenario
that many membership site owners face.

“Sally purchases our monthly membership and goes into our
members area and downloads all of our content and software,
then promptly quits our service because she has all of our
stuff and feels that she doesn’t need whatever is coming in
the future or whatever…she is dishonest basically.”

What we would like is to stop or at least curb this behavior
and only allow Sally to get the current content on the site
and then she will receive new content/products as they
become available. She will NOT have access to prior
months/years content/products unless she pays extra.

We would like to reward long standing members with knowing
that they are getting exclusive content and products because
they joined early.

Please let me know if your system has this ability and if it
doesn’t, is it in the works? Or if you know something that
does this. We are only interested in this one feature…the
rest is just icing.

Thanks

Rod

Hi Rod,

What you’re describing can be done with EE. It requires some PHP coding on the templates and a some plugins.

Here’s 2 things that I’ve done.

1. Set up pages where:

Month 1. They get access to Month 1’s products.
Month 2. They get access to Month 2’s products.

and so on. In this case Month 1 product is common to everyone. Main purpose here is spread out the bonuses to reduce refunds and chargebacks.

===

2. People who join in Mon X only have access to content from Month X and later.

===

Where it gets a bit trickier is offering the previous months content. That requires additional coding and some custom database tables..

IMO, EE can do *most* things that a direct response marketer wants to do. Many can be done straight out of the box.

If you want to offer OTOs or use the Butterfly Marketing concept, it’s possible. Again,  it requires custom coding.

The actual method to doing this is something that I plan to offer on one of my membership sites. I think EE is very valuable for the Internet Marketer.

HTH,

Jer

“Sally purchases our monthly membership and goes into our
members area and downloads all of our content and software,

Hi Rod,

From what you have written it states that you have uploaded all the content in the first place?
If this is right and someone has paid for access to the downloads folder then I don’t really think that this can be called dishonest. Really the system needs setting up a bit different in my opinion.

EE can do what you need but you will probably need to create a module and maybe a couple of extensions to handle the adding of new items.

Quite a tricky one I am thinking because you would need to be knowing that person a has been a member since January so can access all the files in let’s say April whereas a person that just joined in April would only get access to the files for April. Quite a lot of work I would imagine but is possible.

Sorry I couldn’t be of any real help with the way that this will be done as the sites that I have made with EE where people pay for items are usually on an item by item basis so much easier. You would need to set up your system so that when you add a new product / download to the system it (the system) would check to see if the person has paid for access for that month and then add the product as one they are allowed to access.

The only problem being that it really needs to work in the reverse way that being if a person has only paid in April 2007 then only show them…

... lightbulb moment!!!!!!! 😊

I write for ages and ages blabbering on and then it hits me!!

What you would need to do is enter in the products to a weblog with the date when they are entered then say a person joins in April 2007 you would need to have this stored somewhere. Not sure if the membership module stores the date when a person joins, I’m sure it must do but have never really looked into that.

Then all you would need to do is check against the date they joined up and use the weblog to give them access to files that are after that date when they were entered!

That should do it! More or less! 😊

Hope that helps a bit and sorry for blabbering on so much.

Oh you will also need an extension in place so that people can’t just enter in a URL that allows them to trick the system into giving them everything. This can be done with PHP or you most definitely could write an extension to take care of this for you so that you can use all the styling and power of EE.

Best wishes,

Mark

I was reading this and wondering if the overall sales model was not a good fit - like maybe just selling content piece by piece would work better than selling time-based memberships then trying to control what users do in that time.

Hello Everyone,

Thanks for all the ideas! I really like all of the features in EE, but I will need to see if my programmer can make this mods I need.

I have talked with other membership site companies and they all have plans on implementing this feature, so it would be a good thing if EE considered this.

I even found one that supports this directly which is really nice, but they are not as feature rich as EE. Ugh…decisions, decisions…

Thanks again,

Rod
http://anywidget.com

Maybe I’m missing something here, but this doesn’t seem so complicated as to require a lot of custom coding.

Here are three of my ideas, for what they’re worth.

1. Set up member groups for the different member types. Example: “Members” for regular paid members who get access to current and future content. “Premium Members” for folks who paid extra to also have access to the archives.
2. Create a weblog to hold all the downloadable files. One downloadable per entry.
3. Each entry has an entry date that should correspond to the date that downloadable was added to the library.
4. Each member has a join date. While I don’t think there’s a variable to access this, it could easily be retrieved using a simple query from the Query Module.
5. Set up your template(s) to display the files available for download.
6. Using the {if member_group} conditional, display one “version” of the template for Members and a different version for “Premium Members”.
7. By comparing the member’s join date and the entry date, the Members version of the template would display only downloads that were available on or after their join date.
8. The Premium Members version would be essentially the same, but would skip the date comparison and show them everything.

The only special plug-in I could imagine you might need would be to push the download using a script instead of just giving them a link to a directory. This would ensure that no one else could use the same link to download files without proper authorization.

An alternative method would be to use custom entry statuses.

1. Same as above.
2. Same as above.
3. and 4. Instead of doing the fancy-schmancy date comparison mentioned above, set up custom entry statuses. “Open” for this month’s current downloads. “Archive” for anything that’s not current.
5. Same as above.
6. Same as above.
7. The Members version of the template would display only downloads with a status of Open.
8. The Premium Members version would display downloads with Open status as well as those with Archive status.
9. Each month, set the status of all older downloads to “Archive”. Then any new content gets the “Open” status and you start all over.

If you didn’t want content to be archived on the calendar month, but instead be archived 30 days after it was posted, then you could write a plug-in that would work with the Cron plug-in to automatically set the status of any 30-day old downloads to “Archived”.

One big difference with this method is that regular Members would have access only to this month’s content, not all the content added since they joined. Frankly, I have content memberships that work this way and I’ve never considered it a problem. If I don’t download September’s content in September, it’s gone. You snooze, you lose. Of course, I can always get archived content for an additional fee. If you keep your members up to date with an RSS feed or something, they shouldn’t really miss anything.

And one last alternative method, without re-iterating all the steps.

Use the Entry Date and Expiration Date fields. When a download is made available, set it’s expiration date for a month later. The template could display only unexpired entries to Members while displaying all entries to Premium Members.

In any of these cases, I would highly recommend writing an extension or plug-in that pushes downloads to the browser. This would keep your download directory secure from unauthorized downloading.

PJ

P.S. - Hey, people at EllisLab, why isn’t there a {join_date} variable?

In my previous post, I suggested that you use an extension to limit downloads to specified member groups.

Not surprisingly, someone already thought of that.

Here an extension that does that very thing.

Download Lock - from Media-Cow