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Upgrade Reporting

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Hi,

Is there any possibility of adding reporting (at least basic) to the Upgrades plugin? I consider this a very important feature for reconciling PayPal expenses with Upgrade purchases. This would also open the door to increase functionality, as we could use the Upgrades plugin to sell other services such as SEO and other things that aren’t automated via plugins. But, without the plugin even notifying us when someone purchases an upgrade, it’s hard to do this. We don’t want to code a custom plugin to notify us, because the goal of this membership is to save as much coding as possible. :wink:

And, no matter what, it would be good to see a summary or accounting of client upgrades.

An aside: I’d love to see this feature added to the separate Upgrades plugin, and/or it would be great to see Upgrades merged with Supporter so we can charge for all services from a single plugin instead of needing multiple approaches for different kinds of transactions (pay-to-blog, upgrade Supporter level, various other upgrades, etc.).

Thanks,

Mark

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 1:22:03
  • Mason
    • DEV MAN’s Sidekick

    Hiya Mark,

    You bring up a valid point. Reporting would definitely be a good addition for this plugin. I’ll ask a couple developers to comment here. I know we’ve got some crazy awesome new stuff in store for Supporter and we’re keen to implement a lot of what you’re wanting as well.

    Thanks, as always, for your inputs. If any other users have some +1s or other comments to add here, we’ll keep an eye on this thread.

    Thanks!

  • wpcdn
    • Syntax Hero

    Thanks.

    The crazy awesome new stuff in Supporter sounds great! Is there an ETA? Nothing binding, of course…we are about to launch a project and we’d like to know whether it’s worth waiting for the new Supporter. We need to launch soon, so the decision will depend on how far away the Supporter upgrade is.

    Mark

  • Mason
    • DEV MAN’s Sidekick

    Hiya Mark,

    Yes, the crazy awesome stuff will be cool. We hope to be able to provide enough flexibility for ya to be able to say goodbye to the Upgrades plugin entirely.

    Aaron’s asked for feedback on another thread about what folks would rather see – a new version of supporter rather soon – or a delay in it’s release to incorporate the ever-popular multiple levels. Now if only I could find that thread right now…. Anyone else see it?

    Thanks!

  • wpcdn
    • Syntax Hero

    Hmm, search doesn’t seem to be working.

    Regarding upgrades reporting, I think it would also be critical to have notifications when an upgrade subscription ends. I was surprised to learn that the quota upgrade is not actually reduced when a user ends the subscription. Since we pay for storage space, that means we’re stuck paying for unused storage space even when a user is no longer paying us for it. So a notification would let us know that the subscription ended.

    Or, if a user has subscribed to an external service or product (such as SEO services), this would let us know if they were no longer paying for it.

    In summary, I think reporting and notifications are a must for any plugin involved in selling products, services, or access.

    Thanks!

  • Aaron
    • Ex Staff

    Our most recent thoughts are of retiring upgrades and merging any functionality into Supporter. Honestly upgrades (purchsing credits) does not make sense business wise, which we learned first hand on edublogs and so developed the wildly successful Supporter plugin.

  • bizpod
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Actually, most companies involved in teaching online need the ability to sell credits (ie. teaching hours), so I hope this feature will be maintained.

    Can WPMU provide any updates on whether this feature will survive the merge with supporter?

    I also second the ability to track the use of credits (including manually on the back end). Other reporting features such as notifications and reporting of credits purchased Vs credits used would make this plugin a great solution for sites that sell time based services.

    I’ve seen project management plugins that allow time to be tracked manually but none provide the ability to sell credits/time.