RobinHood
Well-known member
Who are Sax Bandits?
I recently worked with Rob from Sax Bandits to create a private subscription based membership community to compliment the offline side of the business, where members of Sax Bandits meet once or more times a month to jam with other sax players.
The front end of his website and blog is wordpress, we built out the community and back end using XenForo and use XenForo to manage all permission based access to content and membership subscription payments through Stripe.
Members pay for 6 or 12 months of access, and this gives members access to an online community, learning materials, sheet music, tutorial videos and the ability to attend one jam session per month in their local area (or as many per month as you like in all areas on the top membership tier).
Brief
We needed a system that could manage subscription payments online instead of the old school method of manual bank transfers and cheques, accompanied by having to follow up with members to pay their dues every 6 months.
We needed an online community where members could post topics, share content and discuss all things Sax, and in order to be able to communicate with members regarding the offline events.
There needed to be a dashboard where users could log in and see when the next even in their area is, along with the latest news in the form of the latest YouTube new video from the official Sax Bandits channel, latest MailChimp newsletters, latest WordPress blog posts and latest community content.
There needed to be a Learn section where all learning material can be accessed based on the appropriate permissions for the members band part.
It needed a calendar which displays the appropriate events for the user.
We choose XenForo for the community aspect, the built in user upgrade systems and Stripe integration, powerful permissions system and pages system.
Screenshots
Login
As it's completely private, you can only see the login page as a guest user. This was reshuffled, optimised and redesigned:
Dashboard
Once a member logs in, they get presented with the dashboard which pulls in content from various services including Wordpress, YouTube, MailChimp, Google Calendar and the XF community.
This is built using the XF pages system.
Learn Section
This is where all learning resources including sheet music and videos can be accessed. All these pages were also built using the XenForo pages system and made significant use of permissions to control access to all the different types of content available to members based on their band part.
Calendar Section
This was again structured primarily using the XenForo pages and permissions system, however for the calendars themselves we utilised the FullCalendar library.
Initially we were just going to embed the Google Calendars, but once we spent so much time designing the rest of the site, it just felt too out of place with a basic iframe embed. With full calendar we were able to pull in all the Google Calendar events data and style every pixel to display it in a beautiful native looking format.
A version of this is available in the resource manager here.
Hovering over the events pulls the description from Google Calendar, which frequently include links to the relevant XF Community so members can discuss.
Forum Index
For the forum index we wanted a card based approach to the nodes. A full version of this image can be found here.
This is the reason we initially chose the Oreo theme from @DohTheme. However had I realised at the beginning that we'd end up customising nearly every single aspect of the theme, I'd probably have just made one from scratch, as the node structure is pretty much the only thing that is left of it! We really like how DohTheme implemented it.
Thread View:
Reactions
The built in XF reaction system is great, and we had a lot of fun picking some relevant music and whimsical reactions for members to choose from.
Member Profiles
We put a lot of thought and customisation into the member profiles, especially as most members will be meeting each other IRL for jam sessions.
Here the XF custom user fields were put to great use to encourage members to share musical info about themselves and be able to express themselves using their avatar and cover photo.
We weren't keen on the stock XF cover photo layout and the inability to see the full version of photos uploaded there, so an add on was created utilising the new version of the lightbox to expand both the avatar and cover photo to show them off in their full glory. It can be downloaded for free here.
View attachment profile-photos.mp4
Membercard
Managing Memberships and Account Upgrades
Some customisation was required to lock down the site appropriately and ensure useful and informative error messages or splash screens were displayed to users during both registration and when their membership subscriptions lapse. This was manageable though with the permissions system, some template modifications and the notice system.
The membership page is the account upgrades page with some minor template edits. The images and purchase buttons for each tier was done using CSS on the stock code to reduce the chance of issues with anything payment related with future XF upgrades.
Help
This was important as many members are not necessarily that tech savvy. So a live filter help system was implemented by customising the built in XF Spoiler BB code and integrating that into the XF FAQ help page system.
View attachment help-page.mp4
Saxofriends
Due to the IRL aspect of Sax Bandits, and the fact that there are different locations, band parts etc. to the community. We wanted to have a way for members to find other people in their area and those in specific band parts. Or to just be able to search by name for someone and easily find their profile. We were able to utilise the very powerful XenForo member statistics system for this. This was incredibly useful for organising and categorising different user groups, the only thing that let it down though is that there's no decent member search functionality built into XF. This makes it difficult to search by partial username or custom user field values.
Luckily there is an excellent add on by @AndyB that fills that gap.
(Usernames and avatars all blocked out in the screenshot below for privacy)
We just went live this month migrating the subscriptions to being managed by XenForo user upgrades and Stripe. And so far so good.
There are a few features lacking here, such as control over emails/alerts/notifications/conversation with users regarding their purchases or lapse subscriptions, which are kind of essential and needed to minimise the amount of time a user subscription is inactive when they expire. Luckily @Xon has a great add on that fills that gap.
Also, there isn't currently any easy way to switch subscriptions, or any way at all as far as I can tell for a user to update their card details. I'm hoping the XF user upgrade system gets further integration with Stripe as the Stripe API and features progress to allow this somehow, perhaps through their customer portal system.
And the users seem to like it:
All in all Rob and I are both pleased with how we were able to utilise XenForo to create a private membership site like this. A fair bit of customisation was required to get it exactly how we needed it, but XenForo is a very powerful and flexible platform to work with.
I'd love to hear any feedback or input below
Join Sax Bandits
We're starting to open up again here in the UK and live Sax Bandits sessions have now resumed! So if you're based in the London/Midlands/Oxford area, be sure to check and see if there are any locations near you. If there is, message Rob to arrange a free session. And if there isn't, message him anyway and tell him where your based for when they expand! :-D
Locations - Sax Bandits
Where do you meet? Sax Bandits meet once a month on a Sunday in several locations. Please refer to the map below for approximate locations and contact us for details about your nearest band session. Saxophonists travel far and wide to participate in our monthly pilgrimage but if there isn’t a...
www.saxbandits.co.uk
Rob is also experimenting with the idea of virtual memberships, which give you access to the online learning materials, video and community, so if you're interested in that, send him a message to register your interest.
Visit SaxBandits.co.uk
Lockdown Videos
They also do projects with sax players and musicians from around the globe for their lockdown videos. So if you're interested in being in the next one be sure to follow their YouTube and other socials. Here are the 3 previous lockdown videos. They're a lot of fun and really creative, so worth checking out!
Interview with Rob about Sax Bandits on BBC Radio Oxford
Update Feb 2022: SaxHQ Got some new node icons designed and rolled out recently
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