Video: How to make money with Akeeba Subscriptions and Zoo in 6 minutes and 35 seconds

Categories // Zoo, Joomla

Video: How to make money with Akeeba Subscriptions and Zoo in 6 minutes and 35 seconds

Akeeba Subscriptions is a subscriptions management component for Joomla and enables you to sell subscriptions on your site - the easy way.

Akeeba Subscriptions offers a lot of great features, supports many different payment options, and comes with top notch support. Most importantly Akeeba Subscriptions is simple to use. Very simple! In fact it is easier to configure than to spell the author's name. The author Nicholas Dionysopoulos claims

5 minutes. That's how much you need to start selling subscriptions on your site.

But is it really true?

Yes, it really is. And we will demonstrate this in our video.

Also quite a few users asked what we implemented on our site to sell subscriptions.

To demonstrate what we did and how we configured Akeeba Subscriptions we created a 6:35 uncut video that shows all the steps and how easy it is.

The video is based on a fresh Zoo Joomla 2.5 demo installation with a fresh Akeeba 2.1.1 installation (means: nothing has been configured yet).

There is no voice in the video, so let's summarize the most important steps here:

0:01 - 0:06

  • We want to sell subscriptions for items in the Zoo "Joomla" category
  • Items in all other categories should be "free"
  • The id of the Zoo "Joomla" Category in our Zoo demo installation is 25

0:07 - 1:48

  • Install yoonique ACL, a component that we use on our Joomla 2.5 site (based on dioscouri.com Juga, which only works on Joomla 1.5)
  • Create a group Zoo Access to restrict access to Zoo items in the Zoo category 25 ("Joomla")
  • Show other categories are still downloadable, but to download Joomla items users have to login
  • However there is no payment option and users have to be assigned manually
  • That is where we need _Akeeba Subscriptions"

1:49 - 2:45

  • Create two subscriptions levels

2:46 - 2:59

  • Link subscription levels to yoonique ACL groups
  • 10DAYS=Zoo Access: If a user subscribes to 10DAYS than add user automatically to Zoo Access group.
  • AKS removes users at the end of a subscription automatically (shown later)

3:00 - 3:16

  • By default Paypal is enabled, but we didn't enter our paypal merchant code.
  • Add AKS "none" plugin to test the sign-up process without entering payment information

3:17 - 3:43

  • Create a subscription landing site.
  • AKS offers many ways to do this, but here only a very simple method is shown
  • Create a menu link
  • The link is only created to copy and paste it later (and not shown in the main menu)

3:44 - 4:12

  • Link the subscription landing site to the yoonique ACL item
  • Add Zoo Access group to the item (we should have done it earlier but forgot :-)
  • If a user is not a member of Zoo Access, then he gets redirected to that site

Configuration is finished! Following is just "more demo".

4:13 - 5:23

  • Demo user sign-up process
  • Use "none" plugin
  • Show my subscriptions menu
  • Logout

5:24 - 5:47

  • Show what happened in the backend
  • An AKS subscription was created
  • AKS automatically added user to the Zoo Access group

5:48 - 6:35

  • Show subscription expiry scenario
  • To unpublish a subscription you have to manually edit the item and change the expiration date
  • The unpublish check mark icon doesn't work here (it looks like a bug, but one which doesn't matter, because typically we never expire subscriptions manually)
  • Show that AKS automatically removed the user from the Zoo Access group

That's all. And this is exactly how we configured our system to sell subscriptions.

Click on the media player full screen button to see more details.

If you are interested in more AKS tutorials or have any questions, please feel free to tweet @yooniquenet