SOLVED (myself): providing paid listings to account types

June 11, 2011 at 06:50 PM

I'm looking for a little guidance on what will surely be some code changes on my part.

Our site has a number of different account types, with membership controlled via AEC. Members pay a monthly fee to be either "supporter" or "insider" or "permanent" account holders.

What I would like to do is allow free members to purchase listings (and this works fine now), but give supporters the ability to have one paid listing, insiders get three and permanent members get five.

Now sure, I could simply generate coupon codes for them and hand them out, but that's a lot of work and requires that I pay someone to be the coupon guy. And users will forget them and need them re-issued, etc. Logistically, that's scary.

It occurs to me that what I could do is create 4 "free/trial" paid listing types as well as one fully-paid type.

1. Free Listing - limit 1, everyone gets access, just like normal, 2 images, not featured

2. Paid Listing - increases image count to 8 and sets the featured flag

3. Supporter Free Listing - limit 1, and has the extra images and featured flag just like the paid listing

4. Insider Free Listing - limit 3, and has the extra images and featured flag

5. Permanent Free Listing - limit 5, and has the extra images and featured flag

If I do this, the only thing I need to do is write the custom code that, at the time they're offered the available plans, limits them based on their account type.

So an "insider" account will see plan 1, plan 2 and plan 4.

I'm pretty sure I can do this, and I'm guessing that the code that controls which plans are shown is in a controller that I can clone and override (in jreviews_overrides).

And this way, I let JReviews do the work of enforcing the limits, as once I constrain which plans are available, any that have their "free/trial" limit met just won't show up. I love that feature, by the way. Makes things much easier.

So a little guidance on where this code lives would get me started.

June 13, 2011 at 03:57 AM