Subscription based websites with Expression Engine

Expression Engine is our CMS of choice at kc web design kent and we use it on a lot of larger projects. It has great flexibility, if built on a robust framework and the community of users and add-ons is very good. It is one of the best web design CMS frameworks around and a joy to use.

At kc web design kent we recently built a web app based on Expression Engine and needed to create a subscription based service that would allow users to purchase subscription plans and then give them access to certain areas of the web app based on what plan they’d bought. We also need a good user interface for managing subscription packages that would be easy for the client to use and easy for us to setup and manage. After looking around we came across an add-on for Expression Engine called Membrr. Membrr did all the things we need and had a good payment system built in. The company that make Membrr also make a service called Open Gateway (which comes bundled with Membrr) that allows full integration of recurring subscription payment and automated payments through a whole host of payment gateways.

Membrr was very easy to setup and get started with and the examples on the site are very good. It takes a little while to get into using the hooks correctly to display things in your own templates but as always the community support is great and if you know Expression Engine syntax and template tags then it won’t take long to pick things up. The Expression Engine admin interface is very good and makes managing subscriptions and members very easy. There is a separate login for Open Gateway and you need to set up a few cron jobs on your server (so best to be using this on a good server and not a low-end shared host) to deal with the recurring payments but once done things should run smoothly.

All in all Membrr seems to be a very good system and is working well for us at kc web design kent on this particular project. If you have a web app or website design project that needs a good CMS then talk to kc web design kent about Expression Engine.