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membership and protected download plugin ?

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Hi all

First post here. So my name is Simon, I’m the web director of a cultural web magazine in montreal and we used wordpress since the beginning. Last month, I made the migration to wordpress mu as we have plan to build a blogger comunity.

====

I’m also a musician and I’m working on net label project.

MY QUESTION :

I’m looking for a way to make a membership blog with protected download products.

Simply : visitors can “suscribe” to an artist. They make the paiement via paypal and then (and only then) they can download their zipped albums.

I would think it’s almost the same feature you have here in the premium zone. I can visit your site, but if I want to download multidb, for instance, I have to pay a subscription fee. Otherwise, the link to the file will direct me to the login screen…

Hope I’m clear enough!

Thanks.

S.

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 15:27:02
  • sceno
    • Flash Drive

    On iPhone so will be short

    Search wpmudev plugins for ‘privacy’ also the is simple members only download plugin.

    Better option may be to use download manager (STD wordpress plugin) with wpmudev privacy plugin.

  • SimonJ
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Thanks for this.

    I already know the “member only” plugin. I use it on a “virtual office” for our newspaper.

    …

    I’m now looking at the “download manager” from Lester Chan and the “privacy plugin” from wpmudev. From what I can tell, it’s not exactly what I’m looking for (although i’ll probably use these for other purpose…:wink:.

    …

    I miss the paypal subscription part of my problem…

    …

    For instance, I used to do it with zencart. One can suscribe to the shop, pay via paypal for a download and then the file, located outside the public_html, is available for a given amount of time.

    Now, I want to get rid of all of this. All I want, is a “membership” along with downloads only available for the members. Just like here on wpmudev.org.

    Or maybe I miss something in your advise… yes, the blog could be private, yes, I can have a download manager… But, I also need the subscription along with paypal integration…

    S.

  • sceno
    • Flash Drive

    hmm… well as the privacy plugin (i believe) allows you to set up “user groups” have one for subscribers and one for those who are not.

    Not the most elegant way of doing but I can’t think of any “out of the box” solutions, I don’t know much about the premium “Upgrades” plugin but perhaps you could utilise that?

    Sorry i’m afraid that’s as far as my knowledge stretches

  • James Farmer
    • Founder & Chair (honest)

    So, essentially you;re looking for a way to hand your users simple ecommerce capabilities – so they can sell (for one off payments and subscriptions) their own digital products.

    Does that sound about right?

    If that is what you’re after then I’m afraid there isn’t much available in that way at the moment unless you want to hack together something based on, for example, privacy – but that’s not to say it couldn’t be developed.

    What’s your timeframe?

  • SimonJ
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Hi James

    Yes, what you explained sounds about right.

    My timeframe? :slight_smile: Time is a very relative concept… :slight_smile:

    When it will be possible… Or when I will find the solution :slight_smile:

    —

    Let me put some meat on my scenario.

    1- wathever.com is a weblabel artist community based on wpmu.

    2- Each artist or project are on a subdomain blog on wathever.com

    (artist1.wathever.com, artist2.wathever.com)

    3- For some content on these subdomain blogs, and to download music of these artists, vistors must be subscribed.

    4- This subscribtion is conditional to a paypal paiement.

    5- (possible option) one can subscribe to all the subdomains blogs for a package deal paiement…

    6- All these transaction and administration are made via the main blog admin.

    —

    From what I can tell, here on wpmudev, you don’t use wpmu… The “premium” site seems to be another installation of wordpress on a subdomain, independent from the wpmu root site.

    In my reflexion, I made some test with the download manager from Lester Chan. It works very well, and I’m able to 1) make the download available only to registred users 2) put the download files outside of public_html to protect them from http browser…

    …Using this on a single wp blog, all I would need is a paypal gizmo to make the subscription to this blog conditional to a paiement based on a time period. I found some plugin to do so. Not tested yet.

    But I would like to do it with wp-mu. The main problem I found, from what I can tell, is that there is no way to register on a subdomain blog… I could do it manually, but well… :slight_smile:

    —

    Thanks for reading this long post… :slight_smile: Any ideas are welcome!

    S.

  • andrea_r
    • The Incredible Code Injector

    “The main problem I found, from what I can tell, is that there is no way to register on a subdomain blog.”

    In 2.7.1 they should be able to to that directly.

    And markettheme.com has a *plugin* which does what you want. You don’t have to use their theme.

  • SimonJ
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    andrea_r : In 2.7.1 they should be able to to that directly.

    And markettheme.com has a *plugin* which does what you want. You don’t have to use their theme.

    Thanks for that. I’ll upgrade to 2.7.1 on my test site asap to see it in action. If so, I will only need to find the subscribtion solution and I’ll be done.

    I had a look at the markettheme… Don’t know if I’m right, but it seems to me that this plugin is a part of their package. I really wonder if it can manage sub.blogs subscription. And since it’s impossible to test it… :slight_smile:… I’ll drop them a mail.

    I always fear these multi-mega-options-more-than-you-can-imagine-plugins… :slight_smile:… I don’t like the idea of a huge shopping cart system if I’ll end up by using only the subscription feature.

    Thanks again.

    S.

  • James Farmer
    • Founder & Chair (honest)

    “From what I can tell, here on wpmudev, you don’t use wpmu… The “premium” site seems to be another installation of wordpress on a subdomain, independent from the wpmu root site.”

    Correct :slight_smile:

    The main challenge I think you’ll have is:

    1. Making this configurable by your users

    2. Simplicity (biiiiig issue with ecommerce)

    3. Integrating it with the capacity for you to make money :slight_smile: – i.e. making it ‘Supporter’ only or similar

    We’re keen to see if we can provide a plugin like this here, but as it’s pretty complex and as we’re a bit busy right now, we could be looking at a month or so before we get it going… but we’ll be sure to make a big fuss over it when we do :wink:

    Hope that helps.

    Cheers, James

  • SimonJ
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Hi James,

    You are &*$/$” right… Simplicity is the big issue with e-commerce. Especially when you talk about web 2.0 users and digital products. I’ll have a look to the plugins/theme suggested by Andrea, but from what I can tell offhand, again, there’s a lot of gizmo I’ll never use in these solution.

    I have some experience on Zencart and OsCommerce. Way too complicate for what I want. Sure, I can manage some membership and digital download management, but if I do so, I use 1% of the script…

    —

    If you want my 5 cents, the objective is not to make some competition to the solutions that already exist for wordpress, but to find a real wpmu option for building subscribtion community with protected download possibility.

    I’m pretty sure that a good plugin for this would make a hit in the wpmu community.

    Thanks for your input. And if you need some brainstorm about what artists and web developpers are seeking for in this matter, do not hesitate to drop me a mail.

    @+

    S.

  • drmike
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    Let me first admit that I really haven’t been following this thread but I did want to suggest an idea:

    but to find a real wpmu option for building subscribtion community with protected download possibility.

    – Create a blog and use the advanced privacy plugin to mark it as I would like only logged in users who are registered subscribers to see my blog.”

    – Create a small plugin for the upgrades script that calls the add_user_to_blog function when activated and the remove_user_from_blog function when the subscription ends. It would have to be written for that blog up there in step 1.

    – Create a plan in your upgrades plugin that calls that function.

    Does that help?

  • easywizard
    • Design Lord, Child of Thor

    I have used wpwishlist for a couple of clients.

    Pretty neat plugin

    Happy to give someone a look under the hood if they like.

    The issue with this is that it will only deal with memberships

    So each artist in this scenario would need their own “membership level” to protect the content.

    Oh yes and the payments would all go to one place