Do you think EE is appropriate for a membership-based website with some more advanced functionality?

Question

We're working with a prospect who is a non-profit membership based organization. They have a website that they mainly use for:

• Event listings and registrations (payments processed for events with different prices for different membership types)
• Business listing management (adding, editing, deleting, moderation)
• Membership management. Members are organizations with multiple employees. Memberships grant these organizations a certain number of seats at each event for no charge (included in their membership fee). Admins need ability to log payments for members and see which members are coming-due or past-due.
• Email newsletters and event invitations to member employees and previous event attendees

My questions are: Are there any add-ons we can take advantage of that would provide this functionality? If not, is there any other solution you know of that could provide this functionality that we could custom-integrate with EE?

Answer 1

Event listings and registration is do-able, most of the EE shopping cart addons support different prices per member group. I'd suggest http://www.cartthrob.com here as it can be manipulated to work the way you want.

Business listings - straightforward in EE, use the Safecreacker module for front end add/edit by the logged in member. You can use EE's statuses for moderation.

Membership management is the tricky bit and you'd probably need to write somnething custom to manage the stock control per member group.

Newsletters - you could use EE's stock mailer or a 3rd party service like Mailchimp for added flexibility and features.

Answer 2

Everything you've mentioned is perfectly capable using the following add-ons:

• Membership management: Solspace User or EE Zoo's Zoo Visitor
• Payment: Membrr (EE-based solution) or aMember (non-EE solution)

The important thing to remember is that the member management aspect of the site will be more or less handled separately from the payment aspect.

However, using the combination above will give you enough "bridge" to make sure the entire workflow goes smoothly. Just expect that there will not be an all-in-one solution.

Also consider Andrew's excellent DataGrab or Solspace Importer if you need to grab existing member data into a new EE site.

P.S. I love CartThrob, but it alone will not make the process work. Even an add-on like Charge that works with Stripe will do, to handle the payment processing portion.