Hello everyone. I have been searching for about a month now to find a way to implement a forum strategy for my site, with no success as of yet. Here is my dilemma: I will be selling several self help programs (downloads) on my website. Each program also contains a membership in the paid forums. So somehow I need a way to allow people to purchase the programs, and be registered for the forums at the same time. And to complicate it further, if a person is already a member of the free forums, when they purchase a program they will need to be upgraded to the paid forums. I considered the idea of basing the purchase on the Vbulletin payment/registration system, and depending on which product they purchase, they would be directed to a special Vbulletin page with their respective download. This would require some custom php coding but I am assuming it could be done… Another solution is to have people purchase the product with something like junkie. People would make payment and then receive an email containing a download link and also some kind of registration module for the forums. This would be complicated by the fact of some people already being registered in the free forums. It's a conundrum I haven't found a good solution for yet. I would heartily welcome any advice or suggestions!
Maybe you want to sell by subscriptions. vBulletin I'm pretty sure has a subscription system where if you purchase subscription for X Amount of time, you get usergroup access till then. IPB has it as well, with IP.Subscriptions. If you want an IPB example on a "customer area", you can look at this. http://www.ipbforumskins.com/forums