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Supporters plugin and more levels?

0

Hi,

Can we have the supporters plugin to have more levels..say like Silver/Gold/Platinum instead of just Free/Supported ?

Awaiting inputs…

Thanks & Regards

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:45:24
  • -
    • New Recruit

    We’ve been talking about this too, but were a little worried the management side of things would become unwieldy.

    For example, imagine the supporter plugin control panel with multiple levels. “I want levels 1 and 3 to have this plugin but not level 2”, or multiple premium theme interfaces “level 3 only theme, level 2 and level 3 theme” etc. could start to become a nightmare.

    An example of use for perspective: We have a new community based site that offers blogs for residents of a county. We use the supporter feature to allow upgrades to “business” status that offers an e-commerce solution. Multiple levels would allow regular blog users to get premium features and businesses blog users to get ecommerce.

    The problem, I think, with the upgrades plugin is that it does away with the recurring subscription model, which has proven to be a very lucrative one for us in many of our projects.

    But like I said, we kind of ruled out modifying the supporter plugin due to the awkwardness we envisioned on the management side of things.

    Unless someone here has some ideas on how that might look that makes sense?

  • -
    • New Recruit

    @Andrew

    Heh, doing away with the credits system in the upgrade plugin has its own challenges, I think.

    If each “upgrade” becomes an independently billed subscription, imagine how that would look to the end user from a billing perspective:

    They more than likely would have signed up for different upgrades on different dates, which would mean that they could potentially be billed a half dozen times from us during the course of a month. I can imagine the support nightmares that would cause. (not to mention the increase in processing fees on our end from the multiple transactions)

    Maybe keep the credit system, have each feature continue to be a subscription that deducts from credits, but have the credits auto-rebill each month?

    Aka user signs up to auto-pay 50 credits a month, then subscribes to various features that auto-deduct from those credits?

    Not sure, I think the need for functionality exists, and the opportunity to add to the bottom line is there. However, I’ve not been able to think up anything at this point that doesn’t end up sounding convoluted from the end-user and/or management perspective.

  • -
    • New Recruit

    Maybe instead of all of these different solutions (supporter plugin, upgrade plugin, etc.) what we really need is some sort of centralized micropayment system that various functionality could then easily be built off of?

    I always thought a digital version of Ithaca Bucks would be a cool business model, maybe WPMU is the platform that naturally calls for it.

  • mikee17
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    My application would be like John said for recurring (subscription) payments.

    Where someone would get charged a recurring Silver/Gold/Platinum payment.

    Although I hate hard coding levels:wink: If you were to set 5-10 levels that a person could call what they want that should work fine. Most would probably just use 2 or 3 levels.

    We could then in the supporter plugin have the ability to say whether a plugin works with Free , Supporter, Level1, Level 2, …, Level10

    Each “Level” would have multiple membership periods: Monthly, Quarterly, 6 Months, 1 Year, Lifetime.

    So the supporter plugin would allow other plugins, themes, and post/pages/URLS to be assigned to different Levels.

    Whenever a free person would try to enable a plugin or access content not available at their level, that requres say “Gold” level. It would have a link saying “Get the benefits of this plugin. Click here to upgrade”

    aMember (http://www.amember.com/) does a fantastic job of this.

    http://www.amember.com/p/Main/Features

    Also if you had the ability to use Authorize.net and not only Paypal would be good. My experience with recurring payments with Paypal is that there are many more failures with Paypal compared to Credit Card.

    Plus some people refuse to use Paypal or cannot get a Paypal account but can get a Credit Card / Debit Card that would be a valid payment source for their recurring membership.

    Does any of that make sense?

  • btray77
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    If you look though the past, dozens of us have asked for this feature. They don’t really want to do it because it doesn’t fit there model edu blogs model. I don’t really blame them, would you want to maintain something you don’t use?

    I’ve found another plugin that works similar to supporter.

    I use this: summitmediaconcepts.com wpmu subscriptions plugin. It doesn’t have as many features and is still early in the development cycle BUT it does what you need, allow for multiple user levels.

    But if you can get away with 1 user level, I’d probably stick with Supporter… It’s easier to use, and already has plugins made to work with it.

    Brad

  • Mason
    • DEV MAN’s Sidekick

    I have been looking for something similar to what @John describes above. A community based blog where individuals get a certain set of plugins/themes etc, but then businesses could sign up for an e-commerce solution at an additional cost. We’re running into the same barriers as mentioned above, but still interested in a system that provides for Free, Level 1, and Level 2 structure.

    I haven’t tried the summitmediaconcepts.com plugin, but I’ve looked at it in the past and it looks very promising. Of course, the final hurdle is a decent e-commerce plugin for wpmu. wp e-commerce is a pain (no offense to anyone) and shopp doesn’t officially support wpmu yet either. Probably these issues will be downplayed once the merge happens.