Akeeba Subscriptions 1.0.b2

30 April 2011 Last updated on 16 January 2012

Akeeba Subscriptions 1.0.b2 just released

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Akeeba Subscriptions 1.0.b2 (beta), the new release of our subscription system component for Joomla!-based web-sites. This release addresses several issues with the initial 1.0.b1 version, released a few days ago, and delivers new functionality. We'd like to sincerely thank everybody who contributed their ideas and bug reports. Your feedback drives our development efforts. Keep it up!

Beginning with this release, Akeeba Subscriptions is now provided in two editions, just like our other software. Akeeba Subscriptions Core is provided free of charge and contains all the core subscription selling and management features plus a few select integrations (PayPal & off-line payments, Joomla! 1.6 user group integration and JUGA integration). Only very limited support is offered to users of Akeeba Subscriptions Core, unless they hold a valid SUPPORT or AKEEBADELUXE subscription. Akeeba Subscriptions Professional contains a plethora of integrations with third party components (Community Builder, VirtueMart, Tienda, K2, JCE, DOCman 1.5) and dedicated support through our private ticket system. New integration and payment options will only be made available to Akeeba Subscriptions Professional users.

In order to access the Professional edition you will need an AKSUBSPRO subscription on our site. We offer this subscription, good for a full year, for just 47 Euros! If you have an active subscription on AkeebaBackup.com pelase note that you get an automatic discount per our pricing policy. For example, if you're an AKEEBADELUXE subscriber you will get an AKSUBSPRO subsription for just 15 Euros.

You can download Akeeba Subscriptions Core and Professional from our downloads area. You can install it on as many sites/domains as you want, for however long as you want and sell as many subscriptions as you can without any hidden costs. If you want the real deal, with the full list of integrations with third-party components and payment processors, Go Professional today!

Roadmap

We have a lot of short-term goals before we reach stable. Quite obviously, our primary concern is to adress any bugs discovered during the beta, albeit they come in very small numbers. From that point, we have an assortment of objectives regarding new features, integrations with third party components and payment processors on our list before we hit stable. Among them: customizable emails, the ability to turn off business registrations and collection of invoicing information, integrations with Agora, ccInvoices and JomSocial, addition of payment more processors such as 2Checkout, Google Checkout, Moneybookers, DIBS, WorldPay and PayPal Pro.

That said, there are also a few integrations that we were asked for, but were deemed impossible or at least not possible at this time:

  • Invoicing. We could either offer a very basic invoicing system that would satisfy virtually nobody, or develop a full-fledged invoicing system. The latter is like trying to cram a boat to an SUV. As you would expect, just because someone knows how to build good SUVs doesn't mean he knows how to build good boats, so our choice was not to build the boat called invoicing system. Instead, we consider it much better to integrate with existing invoicing componetns for Joomla!, such as ccInvoices. If you have more suggestions (like, other invoicing systems we can integrate with), we're open to them!
  • Integration with SOBI2/SOBIPro. The component handles its own payments. The only workaround would be to create a system where each subscription would give "credits"(virtual currency) to the user and make a SOBI2/SOBIPro payment plugin which uses these credits instead of real money. That is something we'll consider for our post-stable releases.
  • RokDownloads. Well, it doesn't allow you to restrict downloads, except by using Joomla! user groups. If you want to apply fine-grained permissions it's best to use JUGA and our JUGA integration.
  • Kunena. This forum system uses a class name which conflicts with Nooku Framework, so it can't be used alongside Akeeba Subscriptions.
  • Authorize.NET payment gateway. While integrating Authorize.NET is trivial, there is a catch: this is only possible using their API classes. The problem is that the license of the Authorize.NET API forbids the use or dissemination to residents of all EU member states and a few more countries. This means that allowing any extension offering Authorize.NET integration to be downloaded by residents of those countries violates the copyright law and renders the developer liable to copyright infringement charges.