Anybody here using WP as a paysite CMS?
 

If so what plugin are you using and can I take a look at your paysite?

thanks

I suggest 2 installs with 2 databases. One for the outside "tour" and signup pages and another install that's in the protected /members directory.

i am interested in this too.
would love to see some paysite members area in action.

That certainly helps keep things secure and simple. The alternative, one page trying to be both public and protected, can be either simple or kind of secure, but not both.

I'm going to try to use it when I relaunch one of my solo sites. I am considering some simple mods I think could get it to work with a single install. I think if you run the galleries through nextgen you can protect the content and use wp bulit-in gallery feature for the free content.

Wendy4.com is on wp with s2members pro handling the members part. I think it the best way to do it overall right now. Brad's way works great, as well.

I thought Wendy4 was using this http://periscopemedia.net/

Multisite man. Use the main site as your tour. Setup a subsite as your members area. Add more members areas to create a "Pass" type membership site.

Map it out on paper.

Yes, my mistake, they are using AMember not s2members.

WP since 3.x at least has supported a multisite or network of sites, with one install. That would at minimum, give you a public version, and a members version, each using different or related themes.

Wouldn't security then be as simple as doing your usual thing (strongbox?) outside of WP itself, and maybe setting an environment variable that WP could use to determine which version of content to display?

You beat me to it

i don't really understand the big deal about integrating WP with CCBILL. All CCBILL requires is a password protected directory. So like people have suggested, one install of WP for the tour and another for the members area. CCBILL handles user management, it sounds to me like that's what AMember does.

i will look at PeriscopeMedia's tours and members areas.

I agree, Or do two and enable multisite

WPMudev also has some subscription/Member site plugins you can look over but I have never used them for adult.

Wordpress Sucks

Here you go:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

That's how I would do it. I've set up or worked on sites set up in many different ways and I think that's best. The thing that gets some people is they think setting WP to not show a link somehow protects the content. Without Strongbox (or something) people could even hotlink your content. The Wordpress plugins only tell Wordpress not to display convenient links.

Good info Ray and interesting to know.

Ive heard its leaky security wise. Not sure what plugins have been developed since but Ive heard that a lot in the past.

Yes, the plugins don't protect the content via a htpasswd file. So that would have to be implemented another way. That was one of the reasons I haven't moved forward with any of those solutions.

I use Wordpress for my site. It's nothing fancy but I like it and it works well for me. Email me if you have questions Mutt.

i'm using two installs, one for the tour and one for the member's area. for Chica's Place i'm using a standard theme that i tweaked and for Gloryhole Swallow i went with a custom theme that JD made.

both sites are working well.

:thumbsup this is the best way

You might be shocked how bad Wordpress is, for such a popular software product. I spent eighteen months trying to get them to fix some pretty simple, obvious stuff and they just couldn't see the problem, no matter how I explained it. They didn't seem too interested in understanding clear sexist issues. Until, that is, tens of thousands of sites were cracked one week. THEN they decided to implement my fix.

Most security concerns and access issues can also be handled by .htaccess mods as well.

With the prices of some excellent CMS programs, that can have one install and handle loads of sites, being sl low. Why bother?

2 installs. 1 tour and 1 members area. Seemed like a no-brainer. Had raymor's Strongbox added to the members version. Seeing how seamless his plugins and install work with the WP install made it so easy. I've always protected my sites with Strongbox.

Don't effing do it! I don't get you Mutt. :(

Don't let anyone talk you into using wordpress either. They did it out of ignorance, and cost.

I like the layout of your site, looks really good:)

Experimented with different CMSs, including the 2 WP installs someone mentions (tour + member)

The best solution I found is ONE SINGLE WP install, for both member and guest.

It works this way:

1. All the content is behind .htaccess

2. Guests see the whole content available, except they can't download anything (and they see a join button instead of the download link - this is done with a custom script)

3. when you join, instead of the join button you see the "download" link. You also logged for the .htaccess protected area, behind the scenes.

4. it does not rely on the the WP login. i.e. members never see a wp login window, they only see a .htaccess (standard) login box - the one people are used to see on their browser. The custom script knows that if you are logged in to the .htaccess dir, then you are a member and you should be treated as such (no join button, welcome header with your member name etc, etc)

the advantages of this approach are:

1. transparent to the user. they know what they'll get before they join. /we have almost no chargebacks, probably also because of this.

2. moves away from a tired standard tour/join thingy, which I find very boring (probably many surfers too)

3. we leave comments on, for everybody. Community interaction even before you become a member.

4. your content is still all behind .htaccess.

Magic Members for Wordpress supports CCBill and Epoch, combine that with .htaccess mods for hotlink/referrer/member referer protection and you're good to go.

edit. forgot to mention Zombaio support as well.

PeriscopeMedia's review of Magic Members was very negative. He's using AMember and he's also using htaccess because I clicked on some of the links to the content and got the password box pop up.

It doesn't look like WP is much simpler than any other paysite CMS, maybe more complicated unless you're going to use a bought or free theme that matches your needs/design. I do like the Wendy4.com tour, not sure that type of tour converts better/worse than a regular style tour.

I run MagicMembers on several paid content mainstream sites and find it excellent, however it can appear unwieldy to set up at first, only because there are so many options to configure. However a membership product can't support several methods of content protection, many different billers and highly configurable membership and dripfeed features without having an extensive configuration.

I also use aMember and think that's also an excellent product. However I think that Magic Members makes more sense on an adult site than does aMember.

thanks! your tour is nice.

Mutt, can you hit me up on ICQ ?

do you upload content through the WP Admin or FTP and then create posts in WP with links to where you have the content stored behind .htaccess?

can't right now but i will add you when i get on there later today. what's your ICQ?

See sig, or if your eyesight is like mine here it is in bigger numbers 19051100 :)

Thanks:) I need to tweak it a bit now that I know more about Wordpress and design. I did most of it myself. But I use the Thesis framework so it makes things easier.

I also did two Wordpress installs. One for the tour and one for the members area.

It doesn't look like you can activate Magic Members in your members area if you are using Strong Box. There might be a way that I haven't figured out yet. But more experienced people have tried and they couldn't get it to work either.

I activated it on the Wordpress tour install with no problems.

Magic Members support told me to turn off Strong Box. I'm not turning off Strong Box. I don't care how fantastic Magic Members is.

I know nothing about Strong Box, I employ my own theft protection measures so I have no idea why Strong Box wouldn't work with any particular software. I use Magic Members primarily because nothing else for Wordpress supports as wide variety of billers or is as easy to customize to support non supported billers.

Raymor, can you educate us what the issue is between Strong Box and Magic Members ?

That's certainly true.


That's what standards are for. For example, they didn't have to support "many different billers". They could have simply supported industry standard .htpasswd files, which all major billers already use. In short, it's complex and unwieldy because they did it wrong.

When I say "wrong", don't confuse "wrong" with "stupid". I'm not saying they are stupid. I've been protecting adult sites for fifteen years. Even someone smart, with three years of experience, is lacking 80% of my experience, so they don't have to be stupid to do it wrong.

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?