I didn't see anyone post that the Account Expiration component has ever been verified to be functional against a vanilla Joomla integration, so I installed it on a fresh vanilla Joomla 1.08 test site at:

www.outofbox.biz/joomla1/

The PayPal fees are set so that I don't lose money.

If anyone is interested in helping to test, register on my site, and see whether your PayPal account is charged and your account is expired correctly; that seems like a good first step.

I set it so that anyone who pays to register is Author...I'd like to let anyone who is registered post content, and I have Joomlaboard installed, but can't get any Forums to show...

More later...

Ken

Is this integrated with CB? If so, which login are you using?

No, it's not integrated with CB right now.

I am trying to bring some rationality to this evaluation process.

As I said, I see that people are jabbering about certain components, but DO NOT see that some of these components have ever been tested to establish that they are installable, let alone functional.

In my next post, I'll report some findings.

K

I installed the .6 version of the Account Expiration control on a new Joomla 1.08 install...

Some of the hacks were not quite current, as file names appear to have changed. Where the documentation says joomla.php, that's includes/joomla.php, and where it says to edit com_registration.php, that file is now called registration.php

I configured Daily and Weekly plans, and

When I subscribe, I don't recall that the text makes it clear that each of the Subscriptions is a recurring transaction...checking....yeah, I chose the PayPal button that says Subscribe, but otherwise, if you don't write it into the text, the only other warning the subscriber gets is that PayPal says "Your subscription will automatically renew at the rates stated above unless you cancel prior to the end of the billing period.", so I would recommend you write it into the text for the Plan.

There does not appear to be a way to set up non-recurring purchases of access to the site- perhaps using/tweaking the Trial membership feature?

I subscribed myself on the Daily plan, and PayPal billed me the $.40 a day yesterday and today. My subscription was accurately reflected in the Active Subscriptions list within the AE component.

Since I seemed to be getting billed correctly for the Daily subscription, I cancelled the subscription (from PayPal as the site owner, since I couldn't find how to do it as the subscriber), and the cancellation was correctly reflected in the Joomla admin.

When I log in as the subscriber, there is no apparent way to manage or edit my subscriptions.

In the Admin, you can set the access level of the user, either frontend or backend, but without more levels like Bronze, Silver, Gold, something like that, I am not clear how the AE module would work for me. Using Author, Editor, Publisher is not intuitive, and seems to confer other rights that I am not sure I want to grant to subscribers.

So, the AE module seems functional. It interfaces with PayPal well, and records subscription payments and cancellations. The hacks are easy and reasonably well documented. The subscription screen could be more clear. I guess that letting PayPal handle the subscription management/cancellation is a nice simplification, although it would be nice to let the subscriber know that's how it works.
I do see, logging in to my PayPal 'subscriber' account, that the subscription setup, payments, and cancellation are reflected.

I hope this is helpful.

Those of you with more experience with membership sites and/or Joomla, please let me know what you make of it.

Thanks,
Ken

Has any progress been made on integrating the account expiration component with CB registration?

Not sure if I did it correctly I am not a coder. I hacked and merged Account Expire 0.6.0 with CB 1.0 and Joomla 1.0.9

Here is what I did:
Installed CB
Installed AE
In the hacks for AE insted of hacking mod_login I hacked mod_cblogin on line 399. Here is my source code for lines 398 to 400:
if (!$compact) echo _NO_ACCOUNT." ";
$loginPost = sefRelToAbs( "index.php?option=com_acctexp&task=register");
//$loginPost = sefRelToAbs("index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=registers");

Perhaps a few others (better at testing than I am) could check this out.
When I sandboxed it worked but I don't really know haw to sandbox in Paypal. All the information was there as far as price goes.
I checked my members area and the accounts I created were there.