«Paid Membership» plugin with PayPal integration! (version 3.0, 2015-08-31)

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

«Paid Membership» plugin gives you an ability to sell membership, access, privileges, and trust levels on your Discourse forum.

Live Example

You can see a live example here: https://discourse.pro/plans
More, you can try it yourself! The green membership plan («Tester») is just for your tests
You can buy it for $1 and you will automatically get Trust Level 1 and membership in the «Tester» user group on discourse.pro.

Version history

3.0: 2015-08-31
2.0: 2015-08-02
1.0: 2015-07-11

See also my other plugins:

• PayPal «Buy Now» plugin: monetize your Discourse forum
• «Restrict Files» plugin. Sell a digital content on your Discourse forum!
• Image Gallery plugin: working and supported!
• «Real Name» plugin
• Table plugin: insert tables to the Discourse posts

The full plugin list is always here: http://discourse.pro/c/plugins

How To Buy

To get «Paid Membership» plugin please buy our «Standard» or «VIP» membership package.

Demo videos

Creating subscription plans

Currency setup

Payment

How it works

The membership subscription page is accessible, for example, through user dropdown menu:

The payment page looks like this:

It is fully customizable: all the membership plans, prices, business rules, texts, colors are editable through admin panel (see below).
The number of membership plans is unlimited: it can be 1, 3, 10, or whatever you want

After selecting a membership plan the customer will be redirected to the PayPal website to pay:

And after successful payment the customer will be redirected back to the forum and AUTOMATICALLY granted specified group membership and trust levels:

Admin part

So, how it organized inside?
First of all, decide what you want to sell.
Setup your forum groups, trust levels, permissions…

Then setup «Paid Membership» plugin.
Below the real settings of «Paid Membership» plugin on discourse.pro:

Next, setup the payment gateway (PayPal):

[CarlPham]

noted, I’ll test. thanks

[michaeld (Michael - Communiteq)]

Does this support recurring payments or will the access just stop after the membership has expired?

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

PayPal Recurring Payments would be one the top features of future versions, not implemented yet. So now the membership just stop when the paid period is expired, and the customer need to prolong his membership by paying it again manually.

Implemented in version 3.0!

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

Version 2.0 is out!

A link to the payment page has been placed to the top menu and it is proved to increase visitor-to-customer conversion rate.

A great work has been done for internationalization.
Now there are advanced money / currency settings:

An example of localized payment page:

An example of settings for Germany:

An example of settings for Czech Republic:

An example of settings for Israel:

[geoff777]

Recurring membership is a must.
Otherwise renewing members will be an admin nightmare.

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

@geoff777

Recurring membership is a must.Otherwise renewing members will be an admin nightmare.

Version 3.0 is out!
Now the plugin supports and uses PayPal Recurring Payments functionality.
A customer will be rebilled automatically when his membership period is expired.

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

Demo videos

Creating subscription plans

Currency setup

Payment

[will_io]

Questions

1. How does this work with existing users? Are they logged out immediately and forced to pay?
2. Can admins allow certain groups of users in without pay? (i.e. long time contributors or financial contributors from different endeavors)
3. Has anyone tried this with a large forum of say 10,000+ users? What were the results? Feedback? Backlash?

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

• The plugin does nothing with the existing non-paying users: they will remain to use the forum on their’s current conditions until the conditions (permissions) are changed by the forum administror.
• Yes.
• No.

[Vhajar_Emortal]

Bank transfer features?

[jamesmarkcook (James Cook)]

Does this support one-off payments? For example allowing someone to post one topic in a category? i.e. Classified ads etc

[emini_guy (Wally)]

Nice option. I would like it too.

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

Version 3.1 is out!
The plugin is updated to be compatible with the latest Discourse version (1.7.0.beta5).

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

Before installing the plugin, you should move your forum to the HTTPS protocol, because PayPal will discountinue support for Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) through the HTTP protocol after June of 2017.

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

Version 3.2 is released.
Now you can set a custom label for the sign up buttons:

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

Version 3.3 is released.
Now you can provide a free trial period to your customers:

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

The version 3.4 is released.
Now you can choose a forum page (or another arbitrary URL) where a customer will be redirected to after he has just subscribed to a membership plan in PayPal.

a relative URL:

an absolute URL:

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

The version 3.5 is released.
Now you can set a custom title and tooltip for «Membersip» menu item:

[STiNGER]

Interested as I am in the Paid Membership plugin, and being the natural sceptic that I am, I decided to try-out your US$1 test transaction.

Here is what I found:

-1- PayPal login page – apart from the broken image at the top left, no problem here;

-2- Payment confirmation page – price and transaction total not shown. See line:

Tester,1 year, @meccano

Price and transaction total are always shown in PayPal carts at the end of the line, right-adjusted. Customers have the right to a visual confirmation of how much they are going to pay, isn’t?

-3- upon confirming payment – I am redirected to the “/plans” page. No visual indication that my payment was accepted/rejected. No visual feedback that I am succesfully promoted to group “test”;

-4- testing access to group “test” – testing my promotion to group “test”, I navigated to URI “/groups/test”. Result: Access Denied – see below:

-5- checking my PayPal account for charges – nothing was charged to my account. See screenshot below:

If you solve these issues, let me know. I’ll run my test again.