Hello, I have made the following changes to this plugin and wanted to know if the Discourse team is open to a PR.
Would also love if others can do an extensive testing. I am right now testing the flows with whatever scenarios are critical to me.
The original plugin is an excellent foundation but is primarily focused on recurring subscriptions via Stripe. Have made the following changes:
Summary of New Features & Enhancements
1. Multi-Provider Payment System (feat. Razorpay) The plugin is no longer hard-coded to Stripe. It now uses a provider-based architecture that allows for multiple payment gateways.
Razorpay Integration: Razorpay has been fully integrated as a second payment provider. This is crucial for communities in markets like India where Razorpay is a preferred gateway.
Secure Webhooks: The Razorpay integration is robust and includes a secure webhook handler to confirm payments server-to-server, ensuring no subscriptions are missed if a user closes their browser post-payment.
2. One-Time, Time-Limited Subscriptions This introduces a new, flexible product type beyond standard recurring subscriptions.
Expiring Access: Admins can now create one-time payment plans that grant group access for a fixed duration (e.g., a 7-day event pass, a 30-day trial, or a 90-day package).
Automated Expiration: A daily background job runs automatically to check for expired subscriptions and remove users from the relevant groups, ensuring access control is fully automated.
3. Complete Pricing Page Overhaul The default user-facing subscription page has been completely rebuilt to improve conversions and user experience.
Modern Card-Based UI: The old product list is replaced by a clean, responsive, card-based layout that is easier to read and compare.
Theme-Aware: The new design uses Discourse’s theme variables and is fully compatible with both light and dark modes.
Single-Page Checkout: The entire checkout process now happens on the pricing page. Clicking “Subscribe” reveals a payment form directly on the page, eliminating a redundant step and reducing user friction.
4. Advanced Upselling & Value-Display Logic The new pricing cards are designed to be powerful upselling tools.
Effective Monthly Cost: The UI automatically calculates and displays the effective “cost per month” for all plan types (including 3-month or yearly one-time plans), allowing users to easily compare the value of different options.
Explicit Savings: A “Save ₹X” badge is automatically displayed on longer-term plans, clearly communicating the benefit of choosing a higher-value plan over the baseline.
5. Unified Admin & User Dashboards Both the admin and user billing pages have been refactored to be simpler and more powerful.
Single Unified View: Instead of separate lists for different payment types, there is now a single table that shows all subscriptions from all providers (Stripe, Razorpay, Manual).
Clear Information: These views clearly show the provider, status, expiry/renewal date, and amount for every transaction, giving both admins and users a complete history of their entitlements.
6. Manual Subscription Management for Admins A new set of tools has been added to give administrators more control.
Grant Subscription: Admins can now manually grant any subscription plan to any user for a specific duration. This is perfect for handling offline payments, providing complimentary access, or making corrections.
Revoke Access: Access for non-recurring plans can be immediately revoked from the admin dashboard.
7. Critical Bug Fix for Group Management
A major bug in the original group removal logic has been fixed. When a subscription is canceled or revoked, the system now performs a “safety check” to see if the user has any other active subscriptions for the same group. The user will only be removed from the group if they have no other valid way of accessing it, preventing users from being incorrectly removed.
Yes yes of course.. just give me a day. Ironing out some bugs related to handling legacy data of Stripe when we switch to this plugin version with new fields.
This guide will walk you through setting up the necessary payment providers and creating your first products and plans.
1. Provider Setup
First, navigate to Admin > Settings > Plugins and select your primary payment provider from the discourse_subscriptions_payment_provider setting. Then, follow the instructions for your chosen provider below.
A) Configuring Stripe
If you chose Stripe as your provider:
Fill in API Keys: In your Discourse settings, provide your Stripe API keys:
Set up the Webhook: This step is crucial for tracking recurring payments, cancellations, and other subscription events.
In your Stripe Dashboard, navigate to Developers > Webhooks.
Click “Add an endpoint”.
For the Endpoint URL, enter:https://your-discourse-url.com/s/hooks
Click “Select events” and add the following three events:
checkout.session.completed
customer.subscription.deleted
customer.subscription.updated
Click “Add endpoint”.
On the next page, find the Signing secret (it starts with whsec_...).
Copy this secret and paste it into the discourse_subscriptions_webhook_secret setting in Discourse.
B) Configuring Razorpay
If you chose Razorpay as your provider:
Fill in API Keys:
In your Razorpay Dashboard, go to Settings > API Keys to generate a new key pair.
Copy your keys and paste them into the corresponding Discourse settings:
discourse_subscriptions_razorpay_key_id
discourse_subscriptions_razorpay_key_secret
Set up the Webhook: This step is crucial for confirming that a payment was successfully captured.
In your Razorpay Dashboard, go to Settings > Webhooks.
Click “+ Add New Webhook”.
For the Webhook URL, enter:https://your-discourse-url.com/s/hooks/razorpay
Create a Secret and keep it safe for the next step.
Under Active Events, select only payment.captured.
Click “Create Webhook”.
Copy the secret you just created and paste it into the discourse_subscriptions_razorpay_webhook_secret setting in Discourse.
2. Creating Products and Plans
Navigate to Admin > Plugins > Subscriptions to manage your products and plans.
Create a Product
Go to the Products tab.
Click “Create New Product”.
Fill in the details. The “Description” field supports markdown and will be shown to users on the new pricing page.
Create Plans for the Product
After creating a product, click the edit icon (✎) next to it.
In the “Pricing Plans” section, click “Add New Plan”.
You can create two types of plans:
To Create a Recurring Plan (e.g., Monthly/Yearly):
Check the “Recurring Plan?” box.
Set the Amount and Billing Interval (month, year, etc.).
Assign it to a User Group.
To Create a One-Time, Time-Limited Plan (e.g., 30-Day Pass):
Leave the “Recurring Plan?” box unchecked.
Set the Amount.
A new field, “Duration (in days)”, will appear. Enter the number of days the user should have access (e.g., 30).
Assign it to a User Group.
3. New Administrative Tools
This version includes new tools for manually managing subscriptions.
Granting a Subscription:
From the main Admin > Plugins > Subscriptions page, click the “Grant Subscription” button.
In the modal that appears, select a username and a plan.
If the chosen plan is a one-time plan, you can specify a duration in days. If you leave this blank, the user will be granted permanent access to the associated group.
Revoking a Subscription:
Navigate to the Subscriptions tab in the admin section.
Any non-recurring subscription (i.e., Manual or Razorpay) will have a “Revoke Access” button.
Clicking this will immediately remove the user from the associated group, ending their access.
Have updated the repo with the following changes/fixes. I am now ready to install and use it on my production site.
Summary of Stability & Security Enhancements
1. Modern Stripe Checkout Integration The plugin has been updated to use the modern, redirect-based Stripe Checkout flow.
What this means: Instead of an on-page credit card form, users are now sent to a secure, Stripe-hosted page to complete their payment.
Why it’s better: This is Stripe’s recommended approach. It improves security, reduces your site’s PCI compliance burden, and provides a better user experience with support for methods like Apple Pay and Google Pay.
2. Rock-Solid Repurchase Logic The logic that prevents users from re-buying a product they already have an active subscription for has been completely overhauled.
The Fix: We’ve added the product_id to each local subscription record. The check is now a simple, lightning-fast query against your local database with zero external API calls, making it 100% reliable.
The Result: A user with an active subscription (recurring or time-limited) will now be correctly blocked from repurchasing that same product until it expires.
3. Data Integrity on All Dashboards The user billing page and the admin subscriptions dashboard have been fixed to ensure they always show accurate, real-time data.
The Fix: Both pages now fetch the latest status and renewal/expiry dates for every subscription directly from the payment provider (Stripe).
The Result: What you see in the admin panel will always perfectly match what the user sees, and both will reflect the true state of the subscription in Stripe. The bugs showing “N/A” for plan details or incorrect “active” statuses are resolved.
4. Robust Webhook & Job Processing
No More Duplicate Subscriptions: The webhook handler has been fixed to correctly handle the sequence of events from Stripe, ensuring one transaction creates exactly one subscription record.
Reliable Expiry Job: The daily background job that expires one-time plans has been hardened. It now correctly sets the required API key and will expire a subscription even if the original plan was deleted from Stripe, ensuring your group permissions are always accurate.
As is though, we can’t just merge in really large changes all at once. If you would like to get these merged into the discourse-subscriptions plugin you will need to break out each change individually and create separate PRs with tests. Also please be sure that there aren’t breaking changes to existing users who are currently using the subscriptions plugin and have many subscribers already.
