Paid Memberships/subscriptions Discussion

This thread is for discussing paid membership systems and subscription systems built on Yii

I’m looking to integrate a paid membership system into my Yii website as efficiently as possible and will be documenting my progress here. I’d love to hear suggestions and overall discussions on integrating a paid membership system.

My website is running Yii with the Yii-User extension.

Here’s the basic features which I’ll be integrating in my website:

What do you think? Is this a good starting point? What are some features you’d always want to implement when making a paid subscription service?

Would love to hear your ideas!

I decided to go for manually integrating Paymill and Paypal with their Recurring Payments API feature.

In this case users will get charged automatically for their account to renew rather than reminding them by email to manually purchase another package. This will require some extra work but from a marketing perspective it should pay off in the long run.

This would mean I’d have to add a ‘paying’ column (boolean) to tbl_profiles which shows whether the user is subscribed to recurring payments, and a ‘plan_months’ column to determine whether the user is on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription.

The cron job would then include a check every 24 hours and set users’ ‘subscribed’ to 0 when the current date exceeds the ‘sub_end’ date and ‘paying’ is false. If ‘paying’ is true and the current date exceeds ‘sub_end’, the amount of months from ‘plan_months’ get added to ‘sub_end’.

Do you think this be the right direction for a recurring payment membership system? How would you do it?