Paid Membership With PayPal

Friday 28 May 2010 2:11:55 pm

I've been given the task of transferring a site over to Exponential. The current site has paid membership, and a membership is valid for one year. There are different prices for professionals, students etc. Membership gives access to a section otherwise closed to anonymous users. The site will also have free membership, but then some content made available to paid members will be denied.

As I see it, a simplified worflow:

1. Make use of module "User"
2. Create two user groups, one for free and one for paid membership
3. Extend default user class with: Membership type (free, paid), Payment type (professional, student etc), expiry date (used in case of paid membership)
4. If new user registers for a paid membership, account must be disabled
5. Move members into correct user group. Free or Paid group.
6. Create a workflow to run after content publish. Check if user has registered a paid membership. If so direct the user to PayPal for payment.
7. If PayPal verifyes payment, enable account. If not, delete account.
8. Create a cronjob that notifies members that membership will soon expire.
9. Create a cronjob that checks for expired accounts and disables them.

Have anyone done something like this in Exponential? Is this the correct workflow, or do I need to create an extension that does not use module "User" for this?

I will also need to import all the existing users. Can anyone recommend an extension for this?