A Robust Membership System…?

[Peter Cox]

xenForo is a surprising piece of software. I’ve been a customer for many years, and have only recently found out just how good it is at handling membership mailings. It integrates perfectly with Amazon SES, handles bounces / unsubscribes fabulously, and is a joy to use. You really don’t need third party solutions such as MailChimp, which of course can be very costly.

On the other side of the coin, I’m increasingly missing the ability to manage paying memberships in a sophisticated way. I suspect the designers thought that this really should be the province of third-party programmers, but I can’t see much in the way of a turnkey solution to this emerging from third parties.

What’s needed? Well the following wound be a good start…

* An effective, compelling and customisable front-end. A dedicated sales funnel that sells membership offerings and lets members easily purchase/upgrade/downgrade/gift/use coupons etc. Paid Registrations addon makes a decent attempt to do part of this, but there’s a long way to go.

* A flexible member relationship manager with the ability to automate and customise member communications based on the usual rich set of criteria that xenForo uses for other things, e.g. email after first day’s membership, nudge email if no new member engagement after 2 days, once weekly new member email for first month of membership, etc etc. It would be great to have all this automated and customisable.

* Easy membership administration. This may sound obvious, but currently it’s far from easy. EG Member wants to suspend paying for a couple of months? Can’t currently be done.

The only thing I’ve seen that appears to deliver some of the above is aMember pro, but some of the remarks on this forum about it have given me pause for thought. Also, it would be so much better if xenForo recognized the need for better membership management and offered this natively.

 

[MacSeah]

I agree. Its very hard to run a forum base community and this is opening up a new world. My forum is supported via such upgrades and I would love to see future xenforo heading this way.

 

[beerForo]

This should be in Suggestions.

 

[Wildcat Media]

The only thing I’ve seen that appears to deliver some of the above is aMember pro, but some of the remarks on this forum about it have given me pause for thought.

I tried working with that mess several years ago and gave up--it tried to control too much of the experience while also having too many limitations on what it could do. Thing is, this client wanted a forum and a WordPress blog controlled with the system. I never followed through on it since this client ended up not paying for the initial work. But that one experience with aMember made me avoid it. It may or may not have improved since then.

 

[Mendalla]

This should be in Suggestions.

And, really, each bullet should be its own suggestion.

* An effective, compelling and customisable front-end. A dedicated sales funnel that sells membership offerings and lets members easily purchase/upgrade/downgrade/gift/use coupons etc. Paid Registrations addon makes a decent attempt to do part of this, but there’s a long way to go.

* A flexible member relationship manager with the ability to automate and customise member communications based on the usual rich set of criteria that xenForo uses for other things, e.g. email after first day’s membership, nudge email if no new member engagement after 2 days, once weekly new member email for first month of membership, etc etc. It would be great to have all this automated and customisable.

This seems like add-on material to me rather than core. It's basically a mini-CRM to manage a paying user base and not everyone on here needs that. I certainly do not. Good stuff, just not core to my mind, but if it went up as a suggestion, it would probably garner support. Wonder if anyone has ever tried using the REST API to tie a Xenforo board to some kind of CRM system, which could also accomplish this.

 

[trapped_soul]

xenForo is a surprising piece of software. I’ve been a customer for many years, and have only recently found out just how good it is at handling membership mailings. It integrates perfectly with Amazon SES, handles bounces / unsubscribes fabulously, and is a joy to use. You really don’t need third party solutions such as MailChimp, which of course can be very costly.

On the other side of the coin, I’m increasingly missing the ability to manage paying memberships in a sophisticated way. I suspect the designers thought that this really should be the province of third-party programmers, but I can’t see much in the way of a turnkey solution to this emerging from third parties.

What’s needed? Well the following wound be a good start…

* An effective, compelling and customisable front-end. A dedicated sales funnel that sells membership offerings and lets members easily purchase/upgrade/downgrade/gift/use coupons etc. Paid Registrations addon makes a decent attempt to do part of this, but there’s a long way to go.

* A flexible member relationship manager with the ability to automate and customise member communications based on the usual rich set of criteria that xenForo uses for other things, e.g. email after first day’s membership, nudge email if no new member engagement after 2 days, once weekly new member email for first month of membership, etc etc. It would be great to have all this automated and customisable.

* Easy membership administration. This may sound obvious, but currently it’s far from easy. EG Member wants to suspend paying for a couple of months? Can’t currently be done.

The only thing I’ve seen that appears to deliver some of the above is aMember pro, but some of the remarks on this forum about it have given me pause for thought. Also, it would be so much better if xenForo recognized the need for better membership management and offered this natively.

Agreed. More payment gateways are essential IMHO.
I have tried and failed with aMember but I do not like the way it handles memberships.
We are "high risk" on all sites and we have paid easily £2k just for 3rd party development for gateways. It's wrong and a PITA.
We really need more than just vanilla gateways.I.E Zombaio, E-Poch et al.
Upgrade management can be and should be way more flexible OOTB. Even a pay to subscribe option would be great. Right now, we have to do everything manually... Can't accept payments as we couldn't renew our merchant (£500 PCA) but we're halfway there using @AddonFlare Paid Memberships but need to extend it for our gateway which means more cash..

 

[talk2troy]

Any new products in this area for memberships / time limited subscriptions?

I am hoping to automate / grant 1 day access / 1 week / 2 week / 30 days / 6 months / 12 months

No, it is not a porn site, but that is the basis of the time limited model.

 

[sub_ubi]

if aMember didn't work, you probably used their default setup which handles cookies poorly. I love aMember and wouldn't change a thing, except for the default settings. Here are some some tips to help,

aMember Pro with XenForo2 Plugin [Paid]

Is there anywhere a DEMO to see where it is fully integrated with Xenforo? I have my doubts that it is what I'm looking for and if it works for our simple paid user upgrades. I can see we have a payment provider integrated with Xenforo that is not supported by aMember if I look on your list...

xenforo.com