Hi,

Can anyone recommend a good Paid membership subscription component?

This is to go on an existing site which already has approx. 150 registered users but currently the members pay either by cheque or cc over the phone. I'm looking for a component whereby when they register they also pay a 1 year membership fee and when that expires they will be notified to renew just before the expiration date.

The site will also be soon using JomSocial if that is any help.

Thanks,
littleET

I'd be looking at dioscouri.com - Ambra - myself.
Dex

Thanks Dex,

I'll give that a look into. Have you used it yourself?

Actually not yet- i am about to install it now on one of my sites. Based on how solid JUGA is, and Dioscouri's support and pre-sales information, I am quite confident.

I have tried several other subscription extensions that havent really been up to scratch tho - this is about my third go!

OK. I'll try it out in the next couple of weeks and let you know how I go also.

I have used AEC. It's really good and stable. I have used that on few sites.

I have also used ambra in one of my site and that one is good also.

Compare the features of both the component and check which one is more suitable to you.

Cheers

Thanks nikunj, I'll look in to AEC also.

I think that AEC looks like it would work well for me.

One site just requires simple yearly membership but the other site requires 3 types of membership with either yearly or quarterly ongoing subscriptions.

As I understand it I would also need:
1. Also have an SSL certificate
2. Use either PayPal or a payment gateway
is that correct?

Nikunj and Dex,
Have either of you used PayPayl or something like eWay to do the payments and if so what has been your experience?

Thanks,
Tarny

Hi

I've used AEC before too. Didn't really like it - too clunky. But I'd be interested to hear how you go with it.

Yep I've used Paypal and eWay - not hard, really. Both good.

Dex

Dex - from what I can see eWay doesn't work with Ambra is that right?

Would you use both PayPal and eWay together or just one? This is my first website with any sort of transaction requirement so its all new and unknown to me.

True Ambra does not have eWay

eWay is more work to set up, so I would only use it for a high volume site. The client needs to set up a merchant account, so the setup process is time consuming and costly and requires effort from the client.

Paypal I use for low volume cos it's v easy to set up and very cheap for the client - no merchant account nor site validation process required. The per transaction cost is much higher though than other methods.

And no, you wont need both -just one.

Thanks that info is very helpful. I don't think it will be high volume so sounds like PayPal is the way to go.

So basically that means that users are directed away from the site to the PayPal site to do the transactions. Does that mean that I would still need an SSL certificate for the site?

Can you setup recurring payments with PayPal?

Also if a user does not renew their membership does that mean that they also loose login access to the site?

You don't *need* an SSL certificate to use with PayPal.

PayPal supports repeating payments as "Subscriptions" but they are under the users control ie. they can cancel them at anytime.

I use AEC but find it to be both clunky and overly complicated in it interface and setup -- you will definitely want to pay the AEC people to set it up if you're trying to integrate it with other aspects of Joomla.

Also btw I will be implementing Ambra Subs in the next week, so I will feedback on that as I go. To replace OSE which has been ...ahem.. a DOG

littleET wrote:



I was using AEC and Ambra about a year ago, and can recommend both from that experience. But, I haven't looked at them recently...

At the time, I decided to go with AEC, as I found it easier to use. It also contains micro-integrations with other software. For example, if you have PhpBB3 integrated with Joomla, it can upgrade your subscribers to a private "subscribers only group" within the phpbb3 forum.

Interesting - can you tell me what you were using to integrate the PHPBB with Joomla?

The reason I ask is the PHPBB integration with AEC hasn't work reliably for us but I'm starting to wonder if it's the bridging software that's causing AEC to silently fail on this task.

Hmmm... I guess I might need to check out both Ambra and AEC then.

On one site it will need to integrate with Jomsocial possibly.

Does anyone have a rough idea of the amount of time which would need to be spent to install either Ambra or AEC and integrate with PayPal? even just a rough idea like 1 or 2 days etc? I need to give the client a rough idea of costs for setup but its hard to quote when you haven't done it before.

cp21yos wrote:



RokBridge - Very easy to configure. I may change to JFusion later as I'm integrating Wordpress also.


cp21yos wrote:



AEC worked for me (with the phpbb3 micro-integration) when I tried it last year. Although it took a while to test and configure it fully as I recall.

RokBridge was also installed on the same site, and there was no conflict between the components.

Of course no-one wants to answer the piece-of-string question.
I'd guess somewhere between a day and two days, allowing for upskill time, visual tweaks and Paypal config time. I guess you may also need time to address access permissions issues?

And that string is always twice as long as you anticipate it to be!!

This will help as a bit of an idea. I have spoken to someone who had eway integrated with a shopping cart and had 2 quotes both estimating 3 days work so I can see it takes a while.

I'll report back if when it goes ahead (which could be a while) with how it all went.

Thanks everyone.