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Subscription and Products to access Commerce File??

Hi Folks...

I have been banging my head against a brick wall with this all week!

I have set up my first site with Kickstart 2.0. (AWESOMENESS!!! BTW)

I got my head around the variations vs content types thing but I'm still not convinved, given that I am selling PDF downloads there is no need for variations, just each product as a node, however I guess it doesn't make to much of difference. (It seems in Kickstart, you must use variations to create new product types?!?)

So my problem is this...

I want user to be able to come to the store and purchase any of the products on a pay per product bases, this gives them access to the file, using Drupal Commerce File....works perfectly.

However, I also want the option of the user being able to buy a 'Subscription' for a year, this will give them access to all the Commerce Files in the private location.

This is where I am stumped!! I am not sure if I am just struggling to get my head around the archetecture or if I am over complicating it.....but I have went through all sorts of things; trying to build a seperate view etc and then allowing access to that view, but then I need to re-created a search etc for this view....it goes on and on....

I want to keep the default Kickstart Products list, which I have all working. I currently have it set up, indexing my products and working perfectly. So I have set up a new product called 'Subscription' with a rule which checks the item in the cart at checkout and it it matches the subscription sku then it assigns a role of 'Annual Member'.....

So based on this role I want to then allow these members access to the files in the product view (which are normal unclickable/downloadable until you purchase them one by one)....If I use the default permissions and allow the role to 'admisister commerce file' then it kind of works and the user is able to click the links and download the file...but this feels a bit dodgy and insecure??

Also, ideally I would want to remove the price and the add to cart button from the product list and display node if it is being view by a user with the 'Annual Member' role. (As they have already paid and should just be able to download)

I'm guessing I can then use role expire to expire the role after a year but it all seems a bit cobbled together!!

I have seen a few modules, mostly Drupal Commerce Subscription but when I installed it I didnt get the new 'Subscription' product type as it stated....is this becuase I was using it in Kickstart??

I appreciate this is long winded....but I would really really appreciate some assistance, I have watched and read just about every Kickstart and commerce post relating to this but can find a thing. I am not a programmer but am pretty familiar with Drupal. Happy to offer some payment if anybody can help me sort this system out.

Surely somebody else out there wants to create a site that can sell products and also sell membership to access the same content....fairly common use case I would have thought...think lynda.com, Drupalize.me etc etc.

(On a side note, I couldnt get the Kickstart taxonomy menu to work either after recreating my own menu and taxomony terms, the main menu simply became 'All Products' and all other links were gone.)

Please please please....this week has actually made me ill trying t get this going!!

Thanks in advance

Gibry21

Asked by: gibry21
on April 26, 2013

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Subscriptions and/or recurring payments are hard. Because:

1) This kind of functionality seems simple, but implies a lot:

- What happens when the user's card is rejected?
- How do you notify the user that your product is going offline?
- Where do you turn to store CC data?
- Many more questions I'm not familiar with... but I know they exist...

2) There is a lot of "business logic" that you may have to build to make certain things accessible during an active subscription vs. a suspended subscription.

Two different options exist right now in a usable format:

1) http://drupal.org/project/recurly

2) http://drupal.org/project/commerce_recurring

And I would suggest a bit more reading on this subject: http://www.drupalcommerce.org/search/site/recurring

Josh Miller
Answer by: Josh Miller
Posted: Apr 29, 2013