Subscribe to Author

Hey There. We are building a site that allows multiple authors in which a user can subscribe to a monthly plan to view that specific author’s content. Say for example … $2.99 per month to access “John”. Another $2.99 per month if you want to access “Steve”.

Initially this was set up with multisite where they would essentially have a separate subscription for each subsite on the network, but Im looking to simplify it a little and keep them all on the same “one” blog. So a user would register at level 0 – and then they could subscribe to gain access to 1,2 … 20 different authors on the site – all at $2.99 per month.

If a user wanted to view all posts and content created by “Steve”. They would be paying $2.99 per month. If they wanted to access all posts and content for Steve, John and Mary, they would be paying $8.97 per month.

I looked at the custom capabilities, but Im not sure if that will fit with this need. Can you provide some insight as to the best way to approach this – without requiring the use of multisite?

Thank you in advance.

Hi Jason,

You’d need to protect all of John’s content with a Custom Capability, probably called something like john. Then, when someone wants to sign up for access to John’s content, you simply display a Pro-Form that has been configured to assign the john Custom Capability to that new users account.

s2Member currently does not support multiple recurring subscriptions on one s2Member account, so if an existing member has already subscribed to John’s content for $2.99/month and now they also want to subscribe to Mary’s content, you’ll need to present them with a Billing Modification form (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Billing Modification Forms) that adds the mary Custom Capability to their account and also increases their recurring plan to $8.97/month.

The Billing Modification form and the Pro-Form can all be configured dynamically, so you can extend the checkout process so that your visitor can select the Authors they want to subscribe to and then pass that information to the next page where you would display a Pro-Form (or an Upgrade form if they’re an existing member) that is dynamically configured with the necessary Custom Capabilities and pricing. (See also: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Shortcode Attributes (Explained)).

Awesome. Thank you for the reply. The things you mentioned sound doable and could be the end all solution I am looking for on this (many dead ends on the multisite concept). In your experience though … do you think this would be the most efficient way to manage such functions, or is there another way I may not be considering?

It sounds like this would be the best way to do it with s2Member. You could always hire a programmer to do an entire custom job, writing plugins specific to your requirements, but adapting your plan a bit to work with an established plugin like s2Member lets you not worry about maintaining things like payment gateways, etc.