Improved Payment Plugin
This page is for brainstorming ideas for an improved payment plugin that allows for a variety of enrolment scenarios. Would you be willing to pay to see these improvements added to Moodle? Let us know!
Rationale
The current Paypal integration for Moodle is limited in its ability to accepting fixed price payments for a particular course and time period. There are many other subscription options that Moodle business site owners would like to implement but currently have no way to do so except manually. This page is for us to pool our minds and talents towards coming up with a blueprint for an improved paid enrolment architecture that will serve a wide range of needs. Once we have a blueprint, we can get a price quote from developers and then raise money to implement this. By integrating a full featured payment system into the core Moodle, we will ensure that it will not break when Moodle is upgraded in the future, which would not be the case with other external integrations. An added benefit of integrating an improved payment plugin into Moodle's core is it will be translated into all of the languages used by Moodle, making it international in scope.
Desired Features
Please add features you would like to see here. I've asked for more specifics about some of these options. Please feel free to remove my questions by answering these questions.--N Hansen 19:42, 28 June 2006 (WST)
1. choose between recurring or non-recurring payments
2. ability to track trial subscription and then add to recurring subscription after conversion (What would the trial subscription offer-full access to the course or guest access?--N Hansen 19:41, 28 June 2006 (WST))
3. ability to have one subscription enroll multiple classes
4. ability to have several subscriptions for one class like, trial, 1-month, 3-month, annual, specific group within course
5. ability to group courses together to have subscribe pages for specific groups of classes (and optionally offer a discount for multiple course package).
6. affiliate program (Can you describe what you mean by affiliate program?--N Hansen 18:01, 28 June 2006 (WST)
7. ability to e-mail subscribers at regular intervals after subscribing. (What would you email them about?--N Hansen 19:43, 28 June 2006 (WST))
8. coupons for discounts
9. ability to set the maximum number of students enrolled in a course and create a waiting list. Send an email with payment instructions to people on that waiting list when a space is available and give them a fixed amount of time to respond to that email before the place is offered to another person.
10. An optional button that will link to a form that can be printed out for those who wish to pay by check or money order for enrollment (I am actually going to make a hack for this on my own site but it would be nice if were a configurable option--N Hansen 19:41, 28 June 2006 (WST)).
11. I have a client that has a need to have different methods of payment allowed for their total tuition. The student may choose to pay Quarterly, Semi-annually, one or two payments. They want access to the site restricted if the student has not paid their payment.
I can set this up using Paypal's Apache Authentication (.htaccess & .htpasswrd).
I guess my question is - could there be a single sign-on solution for these students?
It's not a big deal to have them log in twice but these are allied health students and computers tend not to be their forte`
12. Posibility to get another ways to pay and automatic enroll on the courses, as sms or monthly transfer of a bank account, instead a credit card.
13. We need multiple levels of membership so free membership will allow use of forums and other community building tools and the paid levels will allow entry into courses. With aMember it's all or none using protection or we have to fully integrate and re-list every moodle course in aMember. This seems like I'm looking for category based enrollments and maybe I am.
14. Finer granularity: the ability to purchase access to a theme or a particular module instance inside of a course. For example: the course itself could be free, but certain parts of the course content would require payment. Just an idea-but perhaps this could be tied in with a particular role in 1.7? A user pays for a particular role? --N Hansen 20:02, 30 July 2006 (WST)
15. Allow students to pay for continued access to a course before that enrollment actually finishes. If they get 30 days acess at first, allow them to pay again at 28 days and have an additional 30 days added to it.
Links to What Paypal Can Do
Probably the easiest way to extend the payment plugin is to incorporate some of the features already available through Paypal into Moodle. Here is a list of these and links to Paypal pages describing them:
Subscriptions and Recurring Payments
link to how to add discounts to a paypal button
other variations of paypal code
Links to Previous Discussions
Here are some discussions that have occurred in the Business Users forums and the Using Moodle Forums regarding desired features. Some of these discussions regard integrations with other open source packages and or commercial packages, but still deal with the kind of features that might be included in a fully integrated Moodle plugin. We should review these to see what the most requested features are:
Moodle suitability and setup advice for paid, recurrent, courses
Problem related to sign ons and discontinuing memberships
PayPal use for course payments
The Ultimate Moodle-What is Yours?-Part 1
The Ultimate Moodle-What is Yours?-Part 2
Moodle integration with OSCommerce?
Accepting Payments Internationally
using 3rd party subscription programs
Full Featured Subscription Script Ready for Beta Testing...
Differing Payment/Course Packages?
