Hi, My client has his corporate magazine site with godaddy.com and the blog site with another.
He wants to
1- sell annual subscriptions from both sites, from the corp and from the blog.(it is a digital magazine)
2- reader pays one time for the whole year (12)
3- each month the reader either gets a combination of email reminder to download mag and a new link in their member area accessible only from the blog url, not from the corp url.
4- he wants to be able to allow the reader to download the magazine only from the blog not the corp site. The reason for this is that the corporate site is targeting business owners for advertising purposes. the blog targets the readers. but does not want to lose the opportunity to sell a subscription to a reader if they stumble across his corporate site first instead of the blog. (hope that makes sense)

So far 3 different developers have told me the same thing..." combining to databases hosted on different servers is a HUGE undertaking"... what am I not understanding? can't we use a shopping cart service along with and an autoresponder-email-broadcasting service to make this work without the HUGE unertaking.
If someone could please throw me a clue, I would be so greatful.

Elizabeth Lewis

Elizabeth,
Just going by what you say above:
-You want visitors to either site to be able sign up for membership which includes access to both sites.
-You need a payment processor that can handle the dual membership
-You want to be able to have one list they are all added to so emails can go out as needed (i.e. to download mag, etc)

You have several options depending on the website platform you are suing- is it a static site (html?) or is it Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.

For a static site you can get everything you need by using a service like 1shoppingcart. It can be a little pricey but, worth it to have an all-in-one.

For Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and others like them, you should be able to find a plugin or plugins that will do what you need. There are many membership program add-ons that work well with these (some work with static sites too). These programs can then be integrated with whatever payment processor (ex. Paypal) and autoresponder service you want to use.

Hope that helps you a bit

~Christina

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~Christina|BD Mag|VOSTeam

Thanks Christina,

I thought this would be the most ideal solution to the situation. I think the one issue that is throwing me off is that the corp site is using Drupal and the blog site is using WP. But I still don't think that it would matter much. From what I understand the shopping cart is what actaually houses the database, and the membership would only be from the blog site (WP). The two different platforms is what is throwing me off.

Elizabeth