I have incorporated lightCMS to my website design business and I would like people to be able to signup for the service through my website. This way I can have recurring charges.
Would I do this using subscriptions?
If so how would I do this?
Or where do I get the documentation to learn how to do this?
Thanks in advance.
I think this question might actually be more appropriate at their forums. I'm not sure whether they offer an API to modify users, which would be key for pulling this off.
Or, you could always do it manually. You get a subscription, you create the user in Light, and you're done. If a subscription expires, you remove the user from Light. That'd be the easiest to get going.
Is that what you're after?
Here are the details for adding subscriptions to your cart:
http://wiki.foxycart.com/getting_started:adding_links_and_forms#subscription_attributes
You'll then want to setup a page on your system that will process the datafeed for you. The datafeed is encrypted XML data that will be POSTed to the page of your choice and encrypted with the string of your choice.
http://wiki.foxycart.com/docs:datafeed
...and process it automatically to manage your users. See this page for some example integrations:
http://wiki.foxycart.com/integration?datasrt=&dataflt=tags:datafeed
The basic concept behind FoxyCart is that we don't duplicate your data. We give you full access to it so you have the flexibilty to integrate with just about any system out there.
If you do get things up and running, please let us know. I'm sure the rest of the lightCMS community would be interested in this integration as well.
But even without the XML datafeed processing you could still have subscriptions just fine. You just wouldn't be able to automate anything based on subscriptions, which might not be an issue.
I've read that there's currently no datafeed postback on a failed transaction on a recurring subscription. As it's not a website subscription, I can handle that via a cron task checking "next recur date". However, I can't find any documentation that states on each successful recurring transaction, there's an XML datafeed postback that would trigger our local system to increase that "next recur date".
So... in regard to subscriptions, does Foxycart automatically send an XML datafeed on successful recurring transactions I can use to continually increase the "next recur date" ?
Apologies if I missed this in the wiki and docs that mention this, and I'll say it again - you'all are savage at your product and support. It's much appreciated.
- bret
That said, we're currently working on a much, much improved subscription model, possibly with an API (though that may come later). If you'd like details we can discuss (in a new thread I think would make the most sense), but it will include the ability to modify subscriptions, add tax and shipping to subs, allow the customer to self-cancel, and provide error notification so you don't have to cron things (though to some degree that might still be useful).
Give the XML page on the wiki a look and you can see what to expect, and also check out the test scripts here:
http://wiki.foxycart.com/integration
The 2 test_xml scripts are _extremely_ useful when working with the XML datafeeds.
Thanks Brett.
- b