How membership works on websites built on The FOJ application
The FOJ Membership plugin is intended to help you to divide the users on your site into groups. It is intended to help you to regulate what each group of the users on your site may do or may not do. In this way, you may charge a particular group of the users a fee in order for the users in that group to use some features of the site whereas you may also permit another group of users to use the same features on the site for free.
For instance:
- You may create membership accounts such as "Personal Account" and "Business Account" etc.
- You may then decide that users who subscribe to the Personal Account may not be charged a fee when they post an item on your site.
- You may decide however that, users who subscribe to the Business Account may pay a fee in order to post an item on the site.
- You may decide that users who subscribe to the Business Account have access to more features on the site than users who subscribe to the Personal Account.
- In this way, in case users who subscribe to the Personal Account want to have access to more features on the site like the users who subscribe to the Business Account, then they may have to upgrade their membership account by buying Business Account from you.
Membership account expiration and renewal: - Membership accounts which you may create are expected to expire.
- Thus, when you create a membership account, you are asked to set how long the membership account (after a user subscribes to it) may last before it expires.
- For instance, you may decide that when a user subscribes to a membership account, the user's membership to that account may last only two (2) months or more or even less.
- If for instance, the duration of a membership account is two (2), then when a user subscribes to that account, after two (2) months of subscribing to that account, the user's membership expires.
- A user whose membership has expired may renew his or her membership.
- As long as you have set a price on a membership, a user may have to make the appropriate payment to you in order to renew his or her membership.
Price, duration and privileges of membership accounts: - Some factors may make one membership account more attractive to your site users than the other.
- These factors include:
a. Price: how much a user may pay in order to subscribe to the membership account.
b. Time/Duration: how long a user's membership account may take before it expires after a user subscribes to it.
c. Privileges: what features a user may be able to access with the membership account. - It is the admin that may create membership accounts and determine their prices, duration and privileges.
Default membership: - The FOJ membership plugin comes with default membership account.
- The default membership account does not expire.
- If a user has not subscribed to any membership account, then that user is assigned to the default membership account automatically.
- Also, if a user's membership account expires, then his or her membership defaults to the default membership account.
- Users of the site do not pay to have the default membership account.
- You may assign all or some or none of the membership privileges to the default membership account.
- Free Site/Free Membership: if you want your site to be entirely free meaning that you want users on the site to have access to all privileges without having to buy membership accounts, then you may not create or sell membership accounts. Rather, you may let the default membership account to have all the privileges.
NOTE: Default membership account is a system account; it is not to be deleted or deactivated. If you want, you may delete or deactivate all membership accounts you create but the default membership account is not to be deleted or deactivated.
CAUTION: if you delete or deactivate a membership account after a user has subscribed to that account, the user does not remain subscribed to that account.
NOTE: as of now, The FOJ Classifieds Ads and The FOJ Jobs Plugins are the only plugins that make use of the The FOJ membership.