Comments on: Zine publishing software?

Question: Zine publishing software?

pallen123 — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:45:28 -0800

We're starting a zine covering technology innovation. Anyone know of a zine or blogging application that offers ecommerce transaction support for subscription payments?

There don't seem to be many (any) CMS solutions designed out-of-the-box to support zine publishing with paid subscriptions. Does anyone have suggestions? We're already familiar with most of the CMS apps. -- open source and otherwise -- Plone, Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, Wordpress, etc.

Ideally we're looking for something that includes user profiles, user groups/roles to manage contributors/commenters, and previews or articles available to subscribers only -- with support for paid subscriptions.

Any suggestions are *greatly* appreciated!!!

By: doublesix

doublesix — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:51:11 -0800

Surely Drupal has modules that can do this? lm_paypal_subscriptions, I'm looking at you.

By: unixrat

unixrat — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:11:19 -0800

Drupal can do all of the mundanity that you mentioned above, but I've never run it with a paid subscription model.

By: fishfucker

fishfucker — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 19:13:05 -0800

Any competent PHP programmer and possibly a skilled web designer can get Drupal running with the features you want: all you need is the ecommerce module set up, a couple roles (subscriber, anonymous/non-subscriber), a pathway to paid role upgrades, and *maybe* a little Views/template 'hacking'. I'm not sure how well role-based teaser views work with the core or the Views module, but this should be dead simple with a template hack. if the 'subscriber' articles don't need to be visible at ALL to the non-subscribers, then yes, we're talking out of the box with a couple days of config.

That said, it is *not* easy to make drupal look unique. If you have such slammin' content that it doesn't really matter what your site looks like (or you're ok with a template solution), and you're ok with the way that the module developers have designed the 'flow', then it may be possible to do this on the cheap. If you've got some ideas or heaven forbid, even mockups of how you want your site to look, well, you maybe want to think about hiring on some help.

Modification to existing drupal functionality and templates (done right), isn't easy or straightforward -- if drupal only gets you 98% of the way there, I can almost guarantee you that the other 2% is going to be a bitch, particularly if you've got functionality or needs that are 'non-drupal-y'.