How to integrate software Licensing feature in membership plugin?

[irfandayan]

Hi,

 

I have developed a membership plugin (Wordpress) which provides different membership levels. It facilitate users with content, membership managment, protect variety of content and etc. It supports PayPal, Authorize.net and ClickBank payments. It provide multiple autorespnoders like Aweber, MailChimp and GerResponse

 

I have an other RESTful API which provides licensing services. I'm able to genereate license key, validate and update keys via this service.

 

I need to integrate my membership plugin with that Software Licesning service, that means if someone downloads the plugin and installs it on their wordpress site, it should at first not work. Instead it asks them to provide a license key.

 

Now suppoese if the user purchases the license key for that membership plugin. Sometimes there are different versions of a license, like basic or pro or ultimate , the person issuing the license can make choose whatever he wants and indicate that in "disposition"

 

So let's say user had a "basic" version of my membership plugin that only supported paypal payments or only supported Aweber. I can get the license information and see that disposition = basic tthen i would render only the basic elements. if i see that disposition = pro then i would render the entire plugin.

 

If the license ever expired, I would disable the plugin and ask for a new license key again. if the license key that they provide was expired or deleted or invalid then i would not enable the plugin but would keep asking for a license key until i got one that was valid.

 

I hope you understand all that, What would be the best way to accomplish this integration? How can i manage different elements rendering of my plugin on base of license key? Please refer me to some good example which model this kind of integration?

 

I'm experienced developer and i know how to code but i am looking for some professional way to accomplish this kind of integration.

 

I do appreciate all of your help. Thanks

 

[ialsoagree]

From what I've been able to find on the web, you're better off attempting to sell support and updates for your software.

 

The issue primarily becomes ease of use for your customers. If you give your software complicated methods of validating the software, your customers are either going to try to find ways around your checks by editing your plugin's code, or they're simply going to look for an easier solution from your competitors. In both cases, you're going to get bad word-of-mouth and that's not something you want.

 

It's far easier to simply offer the plugin for free, but only provide support (from installation, to technical support, to updates) for valide copies. You might, for example, include a page with your plugin that your software can read. That page will, say, report it's license key (which your customer would input when they first install your plugin). You can then check that that license key is valid. If it is, you provide support, or make updates available to that user. If their key is invalid or expired, you can send them a request to purchase a new key.

 

The easier you make things for your customers, the more likely they are to recommend you to others. If you make validating too complex or frustrating for your customer, they're just going to look through your code and try to figure out how to disable it altogether.

 

You can read more about this type of thing here:

 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1260516/licensing-web-applications

[Mahngiel]

The issue primarily becomes ease of use for your customers. If you give your software complicated methods of validating the software, your customers are either going to try to find ways around your checks by editing your plugin's code, or they're simply going to look for an easier solution from your competitors. In both cases, you're going to get bad word-of-mouth and that's not something you want.

Truth!

 

Chances are, they'd come to these forums to find out how to remove the activation lock. 

 

It's really a bad world for parcel developers these days.  Open source communities are everywhere, anybody (with a reasonable amount of logic and patience) can reverse / modify your code, and social sharing is dominant.  Unlike the world of Designers (who can throw together a PSD in a few hours), developers need to find alternative avenues to receive chunks of change.

 

Offering quality software for open source (hell, even closed source) applications will draw attention to your work - which you need to supplement the time-cost by monetizing yourself.  Blogs, Screencasts, etc etc.