Tiered Membership & Playlists

You may want to consider some sort of e-commerce solution that supports the sale of downloadable media. Then tricky things like managing payments are already built in. You still will likely need to customize particular elements. For example, you are not selling individual tracks, you are offering download rights for a monthly fee. Still, having existing code to handle payments is really useful. What that payment does may need customization.

There are also plugins that are only payment gateways. You’ll need to decide if other aspects of e-commerce are useful to you, or if just a payment gateway will be enough.

You can manage tiered membership by using one of the roles and capabilities plugins. It helps you easily create and assign custom roles and capabilities which can be checked before allowing any specific action to happen.

Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not a Developing with WordPress topic. This is more of a job spec and that’s not really that sub-forum.

@bcworkz The confusing thing is, I still want the ability for non-monthly subscribers to purchase individual tracks if they want, yet allow unlimited downloads to those who are monthly subscribers. Eventually we will be adding our merchandise to an ecommerce platform, but I don’t know which one if any will allow this level of membership access as well. If I can give an example of what I’m attempting to do, the closest thing can be seen at Monstercat’s website.

There’s a fair chance some custom coding work will be needed in order to get exactly what you want. The idea would be to find existing plugins to get you as close as possible in order to minimize the custom work required.

I imagine most ecommerce platforms have some sort of hook for determining pricing by custom code. Your code could set download price to free should the current user have the paid membership role. Assuming such a hook is available, coding pricing logic like that would be fairly easy. It’s not unimaginable that some ecommerce platforms even have this sort of functionality built in. Like you, I don’t know which one would do this. But if the plugin is well written with lots of hooks for custom extensibility, adding in what you need shouldn’t be too difficult.

@bcworkz Thanks for your input. I guess I’ll go looking into the different e-commerce plugins to see if I can get some more input. I believe Shopify may be one that will come relatively close to what I’m looking for and I agree, I may have to do some extra coding to get it the way I want it. I know it can be done, I just have to figure out how.

Isn’t Shopify a proprietary platform? You will be limited in what sort of modifications you can make. If you feel that you will need to significantly customize your store, I urge you to stay with open source solutions. Recognize that I am biased towards open source software. It’s not without its problems, but I like knowing that I have some control over what software does and anyone (with adequate knowledge) can verify if the software is doing anything shady.

OTOH, if a proprietary platform does everything you need without modification and you’ve done your research to confirm the platform is well managed and stable, it’s a viable option.

I know it can be done, I just have to figure out how.

Heh, ain’t that the truth! The trouble is in that figuring out how ??

Best of luck in your search!