I set up a test site and installed ecommerce last night.

It looks like the ticket if I want to sell some kind of product. What I want is to charge some of my members a membership fee. It's easy to set up the recurring payment in paypal, but then connecting that to drupal so it automatically uses the continued payment to govern their membership in a given role ... that's what I want.

The "submanage" module only receives notifications of recurring payments. It doesn't help with initiating the recurring payment. Plus, I wasn't able to find a module already there to help with this. And I find this odd, because if you're going to manage subscriptions there ought to be a way to initiate the subscription, yes?

My question is .... how?

And secondly, how to connect the subscription that's managed to governing membership in a role?

Here's what I'm thinking:-

Set up a cron task that checks for a) users who have the given role, b) do not have recurring payments. For them, initiate a request for the appropriate membership fee.

A second cron task might check if they have (b) but not (a), and automatically grant them the role.

A third element might be a user hook that, if they match the first condition (have the role but not making payments) then show them a button where they can initiate the payment.

Another element is to have waivers for allowing some users to have the role, but not make payments. This would cover people who live in countries other than the ones paypal can handle payments.

An alternative is to instead of use paypal to manage the recurring payments, to use the ecommerce systems multiple payment systems method. But that would lose the submanage module, since it works with paypal.

Yes? No? Advice?

Comments

Brian@brianpuccio.net’s picture

I read in an old thread after a bit of searching that you first need to enable recurring payments under admin > settings > payments, then, once you create a product (say, in this case, a non-tangible one without any inventory management attached to it) that it will let you set up the recurring schedule. Give that a shot and let me know if it doesn't work and I'll try to dig around for you.

reikiman’s picture

I know I looked at that settings page but must have missed it. That sure is a lot closer than I thought it would be.

I don't see how to connect this with having a user role.

Ah, wait ... I am also reading the document on this page: http://osddp.org/node/287 which says how to set up subscriptions.

Once I enabled recurring payments a whole new set of items appears on this settings page. BUT, let me suggest that those items are out of place. Consider the "role inheritence" section, that's obviously what I'm asking for, but I think it's misplaced. This should be in the product definition instead.

Here's why.

Suppose you want to sell several membership levels, each with their own price and role ... or you want to offer several kinds of products with recurring payments, not all of which require granting a role ... you don't want them all to inherit a given role. You don't want them all to have the same characteristics. You want different characteristics for each product, with different recurring payment schedules, different rights granted, etc.

- David Herron - http://7gen.com/

twohills’s picture

the main product we want to sell is memberships, at several levels. so one product makes them an associate, one a member and one a fellow. absolutely the inheritence needs to be at the product level. We'll have to monitor transactions and do it manually until I hack it

bombaclot’s picture

say I want to have various user levels to be billed by subscription.
I.E. - membership levels for bands
-free membership
-bronze membership allows posting of 5 songs
-silver membership allows posting of 10 songs
-gold membership allows posting of unlimited songs
----------
How would I set this up in drupal, to have people pay BEFORE they reach that user level?

Thanks

stanbroughl’s picture

Did you get any further with this?

I want to set up membership categories for accessing content, but the principle is the same.

Lucy

mattmackenzie’s picture

I'm also keenly interested in this...

bombaclot’s picture

...so if you come across something, please let us all know! I'll do the same.
Thanks

marcoBauli’s picture

After such long time a beta module has been finally released thanks to Kbahey and ready to get tested here:

http://drupal.org/node/53888

enjoy!

mwu’s picture

alas, he's switched over to Paypal membership

scoonz’s picture

I didn't know where to post (I wanted to post to http://drupal.org/node/53888 , but don't know how to update issues), so I posted it here.
I have added cron hook to role_membership module in order to remove expired subscriptions roles. Only reccuring subscriptions roles are removed, non-reccuring subscriptions are considered persistant.
Here it is: www.vocal.com.ua/files/role_membership.zip
Please, submit it to appropriate place.

--
UA vocalists

marcoBauli’s picture

Thank you for contributing, hope someone will review it soon!

scoonz’s picture

I've posted updated version to http://drupal.org/node/53888