PayPal Subscriptions enables your customers to purchase automatically recurring subscriptions from your website. Our PayPal Subscriptions Manager can help you build membership management in Joomla in a few easy steps. With this plugin, you can easily monetize your website by subscription membership model. PayPal Subscriptions provides several benefits:
- Automatic user creation with PayPal in Joomla
- Membership management in Joomla
- Automatic membership enable/disable with PayPal transaction
- You can create different membership plan according to your needs
- Detailed PayPal transaction logs
This Joomla extension is compatible with both Joomla 2.5.x and Joomla 3.x. This user guide will show you how to install and use this extension step by step.
Installation
There extension file are zipped with two files: com_submanager.zip and access_plugin.zip. Install this extension with following steps:
- Unzip the submanager3.0.1.zip, you will get two files: access_plugin.zip and com_submanager.zip
- goto Joomla extension manager
- upload and install com_submanager.zip (main extension file)
- upload and install access_plugin.zip (main plugin file)
Subscriptions Extension Configuration
After you install the extension successfully, you have to configure the extension with your PayPal account information. We also provide a sandbox option for you to test with PayPal sandbox account, which will simulate a real pay flow without using your real money. To configure the extension:
- Go to Components Menu and Click "Subscription Manager"
- Click "Options" button in left upper in Subscription Manager dashboard
- Fill in your PayPal Name in "From Name"
- Fill in your PayPal merchant account email address in "From Email"
- Set "Testing Mode" on "No" if you are ready to sell your membership. Please make sure your "From Email" is your PayPal account which is used to accept payment.
- Set "Testing Mode" on "PayPal Sandbox" if you want to test this extension with PayPal sandbox account. Please make sure your "From Email" is your PayPal Sandbox merchant email address.
Create Subscription Plan / Membership Plan
After finishing the configuration, we can start to create subscription plan or membership plan now. The following steps will help you to create a simple new plan:
- Go to "Components" Menu and "Subscription Manager" Option, select "Plans" Submenu
- Click "New" button on the top
- Set the "Name", "Price", and "Duration" for your subscription plan or membership, click "Save & Close"
- Click the "Publish" button in the right side (the red round button) to enable your new plan
Configure Subscriptions Manager Access Guard Plugin
The Subscriptions Manager Access Guard plugin is help you to set constrain for content access. With this plugin, you can set access permission for your articles, images, videos, and any other contents. You can hide content in articles basing on user membership. To enable this feature, you need to configure the plugin first.
- Install the plugin as "Installation" section as mentioned above
- Go to "Extensions" menu and click "Plugin Manager"
- Search "Subscriptions" and you will get two result
- find the one with "plugin" type and click "Publish" button (the red cross button in front of plugin name) to enable the plugin
- Make sure the plugin is enabled (the "status" icon is green marked)
Create Access Constrain in Your Articles
After you enable the access guard plugin, you can set access constrain in your articles. In this tutorial, I will create an article, and insert an image in the article. I will set an access constrain so that only members who subscribe the 1 month plan can watch this image.
To set the constrain, you can add following content in your article:
{paypalaccess planid} Content for readers who don't have permission to access. {/paypalaccess}
Please replace "planid" with your plan "IPN ID". For example {paypalaccess 1} Content for readers who don't have permission to access. {/paypalaccess}
Here is what normal reader can see in the article:
Here is what members can access in the article:
Configure Membership Subscribe Menu
You can add a subscription menu in your main menu for your users, so that your users can subscribe your membership in your Joomla website.
- Select "Menus" Menu and select "Menu Manager".
- Click "Main Menu" to edit "Main Menu" item.
- Click "New" button on the top of page.
- Click "Select" menu item type in the menu item edit page.
- Select "submanager" and "register layout" in the popup panel.
- Fill in Menu Title and Alias and click "Save & Close"
PayPal Configuration
Setup PayPal Instant Payment Notification (PayPal IPN)
- Login to your PayPal account at www.paypal.com
- Go to Profile -> Selling Tools, find "Instant Payment Notification" and click "update"
- Click "Choose IPN Settings" to setup your PayPal IPN
- Fill in your notification url and enable PayPal IPN by selecting "Receive IPN message (Enabled)"
- For this extension, the notification url should be "http://youwebsite.com/components/com_subscriptionmanager/ipn_response.php"