Secure WordPress For Membership With iSubscribe
Membership or subscription web sites offer great advantages to internet marketers weary of selling digital goods that have been commoditized, such as resale rights products and software. You get to control the content, distribution and pricing of your products - and if you implement a generous affiliate program, you’ll free yourself from the tyranny of the Internet giants for traffic and customers.
WordPress works well for most people because it’s easy to set up and offers loads of custom themes and plugins, all for free. I’ve researched WordPress as a membership site and found there are many that are looking for a solution. I’ve discovered one - it’s not what I’d call ‘industrial strength’, but it is adequate for most smaller membership sites.
iDevSpot.com offers a product called iSubscribe. It is a php-based page protection script with a very good PayPal ipn feature. Most commercial scripts I’ve tried have spotty ipn results; not this one. In fact, most of iDevSpot’s products have PayPal payments built in - and they really work.
Now you are not going to be able to run a community behind this script, such as forums, etc. and have the user’s accounts tied to their site access password. This script uses a php include to protect pages - your pages have to be in php (no folder-level protection using .htaccess). But if you just want to provide some premium content in WordPress and have a convenient way for user to pay for it - iSubscribe is the way to go. It is also easy to integrate iSubscribe with NixieAffiliate, iDevSpot’s affiliate script.
This script does have one issue with sending email - it uses the php built-in mail() function and it may behave strangely on some web hosts. It currently does on my install and I’m working on a fix - which I’ll post here. Most commercial php scripts arrive to you encrypted - but IdevSpot’s scripts are not, and are easy to modify as you see fit. The site’s forums are helpful and friendly. Note that this script is not just for WordPress - it will protect any php web page.
Given the very reasonable cost of this script - I recommend you give iDevSpot’s iSubscribe a try.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Here is the fix for the mail issue with iSubscribe. Turns out it was mainly the way Gmail handles mail headers.
Edit the authorize.php file:
replace:
$headers.= “MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n”;
$headers.= “Content-type: text/html; “;
$headers.= “charset=iso-8859-1\r\n”;
with this:
$headers.= “MIME-Version: 1.0\n”;
$headers.= “Content-type: text/html; “;
$headers.= “charset=iso-8859-1\n”;
You are taking the \r ’s out of the headers.
Make the same change with the ipn.php file.
That’s all it is..
[…] a previous blog post, I explanied how iDevSpot’s iSubscribecould be used to set up a membership site with […]
Subscribe to Comments for Data SystemsPlus by Email
Leave a Comment