The two options I’ve been looking at today are phpBB3 and bbPress, which is supposed to integrate well with WordPress, but still seems a little shaky. My other big issue with bbPress is that I’m going to need to be able to handle several different account levels.
Here’s what we were thinking as far as memberships…
Admins–obviously, the master users
Publishers–there wouldn’t be many publishers, but we don’t want to be the only ones charged with posting content.
Charter Members–these are members that are with us from the beginning. They’re helping us get started by filling out online surveys (more on that in a different post) and contributing resources. We want the site to be free forever for these members.
Premium Members–pay a monthly membership and have access to everything on the site so long as their payments are current.
Regular Members–free membership, but limited in what they can see. Basically, we’ll be showing them just enough to make them want to be Premium Members.
Guests–can see only a couple of articles and evidence that there is plenty more there. For instance, there will be several podcasts and videos available or Regular Members.
We’re also considering a Pay Per View model for many of our videos and possibly for podcasts for people who just want specific information. They’d have to be regular members, of course, and hopefully they’d become Premium Members.
So our message board software needs to be able to distinguish between these users as well. I’m big on free software, but it’s looking like it would be a good investment to buy aMemberPro. It integrates well with WordPress and phpBB3, plus handles all the PayPal stuff.
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