[consulting] Re: OG and payments

[Khalid B]

Just an update on this.

I discussed this with Moshe, and what needs to be done is to call
og_save_subscription() from the payment module when the payment
is confirmed (e.g. via IPN)

However, the client's requirements have shifted a bit, and og seems
overkill for them. So, it seems  simple_access or taxonomy_access
for the sections of pay-to-read content is enough.

The trick is to allow "purchasing a role". For this  see this issue,
and specifically patch 54
http://drupal.org/node/53888#comment-111105

Which has a working "role membership" product for  ecommerce.

The catch  here is that users have to renew themselves (a constraint
on recurring payments using ecommerce), not automatically. For
credit cards there is no mechanism short of storing the credit  card
info and running it thru the system at the end of the subscription
period. This has lots of security implications since storing credit
card data is a big no no. A few credit card gateways offer  a token
based renewal (x-act?)  but  it is  not a standard way.

So, this leaves us with Paypal subscriptions as the most convenient
way of doing subscriptions. The paypal framework and paypal subscriptions
are a good base to build on, but have some limitations (heavy queries and
strange way of doing expiry), so I will probably end up writing a paypal
membership module, which will also accept manual renewals via
cheques for example.