See my reply to you above re complex and unwieldy. Likely, it COULD be made to work, but so far we haven't come across a site where it makes any sense to use MagicMembers. People are using MagicMembers "to integrate a biller with Wordpress". That integration is all of six lines of code, so using 5,000 lines is overkill by several orders of magnitude. Kind if like dropping a house on a spider to kill the spider. We probably COULD work with your house dropping plans, but so far we've just handed people a flyswatter.

The billing integration is a small part of Magic Members and similar products. Magic Members does more than billing integration, it allows you to manage paid content, drip feed that content, make some of that content conditionally free, paid or partially paid.

Like it or not, the rest of the world has moved beyond .htaccess and now uses database based user management with session management and .htaccess does not lend itself to functions such as make something free for three days then partially protect it behind a pay wall.

Hey Mutt
neither :-)

our worflow is the following:
1. edited videos are placed by the editors in a "blind" ftp dir (outside public_html). similar for pictures.
2. an internal custom cms checks for the available content to be posted as a website update.
3. from the internal custom cms, which we call CandidFox, "updaters" check for the updates available for each site for the week. They add a description, tags, etc, and the content is ready to go.
4. Updates are scheduled for each site for the week, based on the available content.
5. The update posting is done directly from our custom cms, which connects with each WP install via XMLRPC. The script moves the content to the .htaccess protected folder, takes care automagically to place proper links for members, categories, FLV for affiliates etc.

It sounds complex but from each person involved in the process is just 1 click. They don't even ever login in WP, nor they have any clue what WP is for that matter. Basically WP is just used as a frontend.

When we started with this approach, it was admittedly an overkill.
We were back then processing less than 10k / month and had just 2 sites.

I am really happy we took this approach early on. It allows now us to update 8 sites, and add new ones every month, with a ridicolously low overhead.

Also, adding a new site is a matter of 5 minutes, we install a new WP and add variables in our custom backend.

ps: In the past i have given access to sneek peak into this to people who were interested, on GFY. I don't mind doing it again :)

The ability to drip content is the most interesting feature of the plugins for me.

nice solution you've come up with for yourself :thumbsup

so for each piece of content you have to update through the tour side WP admin and then through the members area WP admin?

Yes, I post teasers for updates on my tour and ftp the full updates to my server. I customized my Wordpress Thesis framework theme with some php and Thesis hooks.

I don't upload every photo or video format in the members area WP admin. I upload the photo zips and video files to the server. I make new posts in the members area WP admin using tags and custom fields.

From there it's all automated. I don't have to make photo galleries or video pages by hand or with a plugin.

I should add that using hooks isn't unique to the Thesis framework. You can buy other frameworks or premium themes and do the same thing. I work with the Genesis framework also and they are pretty similar.

You realize when you talk about session management and such versus basic auth in .htaccess that's exactly what separates Strongbox from the bandaids, right? Strongbox was the first major system to have proper authentication sessions on the web.

IF you're dripping content, making different content available to different members, and having content switch fron free to paid and back, then MagicMembers might make sense. For what most webmasters want, having people pay before accessing the members' area, MagicMembers is completely unnecessary. Again, it's five thousand lines of code to accomplish what can be fine in six lines. Completely the wrong tool for the job that most webmasters want done, when we ask them what they want.


"The complex billing integration is just a small part" is right. Then there's the 99% of MagicMembers which, so far, none of our webmasters have been interested in. No need to buy a house in order to get the shower head.

I am also considering a WP members - I was looking at Magic Members.

I was going to do a static tour and change it manually - any reason a second WP install is better than this?

This is what I want to get.
http://www.adultsitecms.com/home

Yes, to protect your content. With MagicMembers alone, your content is still wide open for people to download, hotlink, whatever. What MagicMembers does is it lets you set up complex rules for which links Wordpress will show.

Just don't get MagicMembers for the purpose of integrating billing. There are ways to do that which are literally a thousand times simpler. If you want to do a bunch of other weird stuff, MagicMembers might make sense.

i recently wrote a paysite CMS on WP. i used the follow plugins.

add from server - so i can use ftp upload and access files outside of the web root
custom upload dir - goes along with the above... also allows me to store/manage videos outside of the apache webroot, and inside of the lighttpd webroot. as i used mod_secdownload and lighttpd for simple content security and delivery.
diamond multisite widgets - i use it as a simple way to clone posts to multiple sites on the network,. usually disabled.
front end users - to keep most users out of the wordpress part of things
gravity forms - easy to leave out, just used for form management and to store tickets and contact requests
members - used for member member flow.. attempted, active, expired, declined. this way we can treat them all differently in templates
NextGen Gallery - manages photos, after about 100k photos it tends to get kinda wonky though
post views - simple plugin to count post views
post ratings - simple post rating plugin, low on bloat.
raw html - i hate WPs formatting
relation post types - used to tie "models" to "updates"
types - used to create custom post types
wordpress MU domain mapping - domain mapping plugin.
wp-paginate - easy to manage pagination on custom page/post types
wp favorite posts - for members to manage favorites.

i also wrote a bit of custom code for allow biller integration. billers are actually quite easy, zombaio managing members in wordpress is 21 lines of php.

total cost $0. took about a day and half to write and get working. however a custom template is mandatory.

That is my plan to do...

mod_secdownload looks interesting, thanks for that tip. I found this for nginx too, maybe there's still more.
http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpSecureDownload

I'd love to add this feature for my members. Would it work with strongbox?

yes it would.

Using Wordpress for a paysite would be like using a cardboard box as a safe and putting it next to a pool on a windy day.

Mutt if you don't have the funds don't open a paysite.

Your content should be the most precious thing in the world to you. Protect it and your girls with your life.

Mutt you intrigue and annoy the hell out of me.

i need wp members area setup, somebody show me a working example, preferrably with free plugins etc

+1 we did exactly the same approach, our sites avidolz.com and mycuteasian.com have one WP install (tour and member). The use of cache system (w3-total-cache) is mandatory on huge traffic sites!

see sig. both of my sites are wp.

I'm looking at their VOD offering, ClickcastX, then integrating that later on.
I believe both work with Strongbox too.

If you've used it, would love to hear your experience.

To confirm what Why said, yes. Any and plugins work fine with Strongbox. Wordpress tells the plugin what the username is. The plugins don't know or care that earlier Strongbox told Wordpress what the user name is.

The only exception would be certain plugins which themselves do authentication (log in). If the plugin logs people in based on, say, a VBulletin database, it would be expecting to handle log in and if improperly coded might not respect the fact that they have already logged in via Strongbox. Even in those cases, there are two simple solutions. Either a) simply set Strongbox to authenticate against vbulletin database, making the other plugin unnecessary, or b) fix the other plugin to check to see if they are already logged in.

does anybody know who's behind the company that does AdultSiteCMS and XClickCast?

Be careful with them. I bought it with confidence because they listed many companies and software that was compatible with AdultSiteCMS. They said that Strongbox was one of their 'partners'.

We installed it and every link in the members area broke. We asked them to fix it and they turned Strongbox off. The links worked again. After lots of emailing back and forth (and delays in responding to emails) they agreed that the current version wasn't compatible with Strongbox.

I didn't like lots of other things from a design perspective. It felt like a dumbed down version of Elevated X in terms of features and design. The standard template was ugly and you'd need to hire a designer if you wanted to change it.

It didn't feel like Wordpress at all. You couldn't even install widgets in the side bar in the version I tried.

The current version might be much better. But I'd still be very wary.

Research different WP premium themes and WP frameworks. You'll be able to read TONS of reviews instead of a handful for AdultSiteCMS

Thanks! Installed it last night and it works perfectly:)

Shit, thanks for the warning :(