Hi there.
Just a quick question.
For many sites, my own included, there is a requirement to manage the members in some way, especially where there may be membership fees involved.

What is the accepted "best practice" in Drupal (6) for handling the management of members, and the additional data that you would want to associate with each member? the sorts of things one would be looking for is something like:

1. To track fee payments by members (just track whether someone is a paid-up member or not)
2. To grant access based on these informations.
3. Automatically send out a new bill, when the time they have payed for has run out.

Love to hear some comments the "right" way to handle this stuff in Drupal 6. I'm about to build a site, where payment is required to enter the site. Users can either pay X for 1 month or Y for 6 months. And when the time is up, either the will have to pay again (and wont have access until they do) or automatically be billed. Obviously don't want to reinvent the wheel, but I also don't want to use out-dated modules and methods...

So just some input from other users, who might have attempted the same would be great.

Thankyou
/Lone

Comments

Patroclas’s picture

Patroclas commented

I am not sure what the 'correct' method is but this is what I do and it is working well at the moment. I may be taking a risk using the dev version but it seems to be working well and I had no alternative.

This module will manage PayPal subscriptions, I have two subscriptions, one for each of two roles. They are set to be recurring so Paypal should handle the end-of-term stuff. As far as my tests show, a user who unsubscribes is demoted from their subscribed role.

Subscribed users have access to role-specific profile forms handled by cck and the content-profile module. By setting permissions for each role and for the menus they see, it is possible to keep the two roles separate, with different levels of access to the site.

Views handles the listing and display of subscribed users. I find the contemplate module useful for theming the output of user profiles.

I also have postal subscriptions to the same roles as above. These are harder to manage than PayPal. I have an admin only date field in the user's profile form that records (manually) a postal subscription end date. A views list then picks up users nearing the end of term and they are contacted manually. The main problem at the moment is that the date field cannot be completed until after the user has saved their profile form (because some of the fields are 'required') unless an admin completes the required fields in some way. It would be great if the date field in the core profile module would interface with views - but it wont, it's basically pretty useless.

The site is actually set up to allow volunteers to find placements with host organisations. Other modules handle bookmarking and contacting facilities to create a kind of networking facility.

This is probably a bit off-topic for an issue for this module, but it does show its potential.

john franklin’s picture

john franklin commented
Version: 6.x-1.x-dev » 6.x-2.x-dev

Anything here that hasn't been implemented yet will be done in the 6.x-2.x branch.