CCBill is definitely the #1 most popular processor, so if you have trouble deciding
CCBill is a safe bet. Other processors may have advantages and disadvantages,
so you might choose another one, but if you pretty much want to avoid "screwing up"
CCBill is kind of the standard that most webmasters use. Their system is technically
superior, letting you do some neat things as you grow. Their customer support is
good at times, not so good other times.
Stay away from PayPal, 2checkout, ePassporte, or any other services that you don't
hear at least a couple of recommendations for from sucessful adult webmasters.
None of these services is really designed for memberships to an adult site.
Paypal will shut off your account if they even suspect you're doing anything adult
related. While some alternative processors may be useful in very special circumstances,
you do NOT want to get creative with this until you are experienced and very well
informed about the issues, particularly technical issues related to processing.
Until then, stick to the big ones that are so well proven in the adult industry -
CCBill, Epoch/Paycom or perhaps Verotel.
Here are some server side scripts for creating and
managing members area galleries:
Coppermine is a good free open source one:
http://coppermine.sourceforge.net/
Take a look around the site and look at the demos.
As far as the galleries themselves Coppermine is excellent,
with many features and very configurable this is the one
I'd probably use myself if I were creating a site, either
Coppermine or the dynamic gallery script I'll discuss
last.
a-ConMan at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/a-conman/ and
http://www.bettercgi.com/a-conman/screenshots/
This one used to sell for $3,500. It's nice because you can manage
several sites from one interface using one content database.
The company went out of business after they lost their programmer
and now the script is free and open source. I've taken over as project
manager.
I don't have a nice web site up for it yet, but it's a reasonably
good script. While it does have it's problems and is certainly
_not_ perfected yet, it does the basic job and is free.
Not worth the $3,500 that some people paid for it,
it might be for you if you only have $200 in your budget.
You can download the script for free but I just started writing the
documentation so having me install it will probably save you
about 2 days of struggling with it. I charge $200 to install and support it.
SiteDepth
http://www.sitedepth.com/
I haven't a had a chance to use this one, but I've
heard good things about it, it looks to be very profesionally
done, and the people involved seem to be nice, helpful people.
Webmasters using their version 2.0 seemed to like it
quite a bit. One webmaster reports that their new version 3.0
is still fairly buggy / incomplete as of June of 2005.
Based on his comments, you might not get as good of
support with SiteDepth as you might get with some others.
The above scripts essentially do predefined gallery rotation.
One plugin gallery provider wanted dynamic galleries where
the user could click on a models name, for example, and get a
listing of all galleries with the model. The user could also select
a category and get a list of all galleries in that category, or search
for all sets of chicks with a-cup boobs, or red hair, or even red headed
chicks with a-cup boobs. This is cool because you can make feeder
sites instantly. The entire content section of the feeder
site is just a call to the script. For example, if you want
to have a "big titted redheads" site the members URL would be:
/cgi-bin/rmeecontent/psetsearch.cgi?hair=red&brafrom=c&brato=z.
For that we made some modifications to my content store script and
it really works great. This last script is my favorite for sure,
but my taste in scripts may not be the same as yours.
All of the above scripts are certified Strongbox compatible,
so they will work with the state of the art defense system
needed by todays pay sites.
When you talk to the people selling the scripts I
mentioned, please tell them you heard about their
scripts from "Ray, the Strongbox guy". Each of the
companies/programmers behind these scripts have been
helpful to me and I'd like them to know I appreciated
it enough to spend a few moments telling you about
their products.