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Hope this is OK to ask here.

I have a relatively simple EE site set up, and I am soon looking to expand the sites scope by adding the option for business owners to be able to post an advert/description of their business to the site. The advert will be entered via a safecracker form on the front end, and will become an entry into the relevant channel.

For this I want to charge a yearly fee.

I am currently looking at the possible options.

I can either:

a. Charge a yearly subscription for the actual ad. Therefore anyone can add an advert, and pay on a "per ad" basis.

or

b. Charge the business a yearly fee for access to the "advertisers" member group. Once they have paid for access and become an advertiser, allow them to access the safecracker forms to upload their ad.

At the moment I do not mind which scenario I take, but I am looking at the possible options for each.

As far as I am aware, the only two add-ons that will allow me to create this functionality are CartThrob (together with the new Subscriptions add-on) or Membrr.

Initially I thought Membrr, as it would allow me to implement option 1 (and 2 I think!), but I have heard a few reports that it is not the easiest to implement.

I have seen recommendations for CT, although the initial price is steep, and I think it is probably a bit overkill in terms of functionality for what I want to achieve.

I was wondering if anyone had any experience they can share, or suggest another way of adding this functionality.

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  • Thinking out loud now, but I think it's possible to implement a version of this functionality, via Simple Commerce. I think it would work like this: channel is created membership item/entries. User signs up for an account as normal, and then has a link to 'upgrade' to an advertiser. The link takes the user to buy the membership item, it's passed to PayPal for payment and once payment is received, that user moves into the 'advertisers' member group. I can the use conditionals based on the member group to allow the user to see/access safecracker forms to add their advert. Easy enough eh? :)
    – shorn
    Jan 28, 2013 at 11:59
  • Could you elaborate on how this would work? How do you move the member to the advertisers group once paypay payment is received? That would require a custom add-on right?
    – Benek Lisefski
    Oct 30, 2013 at 23:15

2 Answers 2

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I would suggest you to use Membrr module (http://www.membrr.com/).

The Membrr module has a very good feature of "Channel Protection" which seems to fit perfectly according to your need and it have much less price than CT :).

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  • I'm thinking it will be the way to go. I think the ideal scenario in my case will be for the business to sign up for an account. Once they have signed up, there is the option to "upgrade" to an advertisers account. This will incur the yearly subscription charge, and they will move into the 'advertisers' member group. Any members within the 'advertisers' member group will have access to SAEF's to enter the business details. It seems like Membrr will do all this functionality. Just depends on how easy it is to implement for a newbie!
    – shorn
    Jan 27, 2013 at 20:53
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Well, i would still recommend CartThrob!

I actually did something for a site with the Cartthrob Pro add-on that sounds like what you want to do. It was for a property site where the site allowed a property owner to add a listing for their property and then add that listing to their basket. They could then pay for it and on payment confirmation that property listing (an EE entry) would have it's status changed from "pending" to "open" so that listing was made live. This used a custom extension i built.

Your scenario would be the same but change "listing" to "advert" in the above! There is now a extension on Cartthrobs github account that does exactly what my extension did and it's free too.

Whatever route you take, i appreciate it's much more expensive, but Cartthrob will allow you the most flexibility.

Just my 2 cents :)

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  • That does sound good. Although I am finding it very hard at the moment to justify the price, especially as I think I've found a way to achieve it with Simple Commerce.
    – shorn
    Jan 28, 2013 at 11:52
  • That's cool, if you've found another way to do it then that's grand. Make sure you add that as an answer and put in a brief description on this thread and click "Answer your own question". Also, feel free to upvote my answer if you found it useful ;)
    – JohnWBaxter
    Jan 28, 2013 at 13:16
  • Upvoted! I am just about to launch my redesign, and then bake in this ability shortly after. I'm going to have a better look through the SC docs and Paypal docs as well. Looks straightforward enough, but then it always does until you delve into it!
    – shorn
    Jan 28, 2013 at 14:52

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