MediaWiki/Special/SiteSubscribe

Overview
Special:SiteSubscribe is a MediaWiki extension to provide functions for managing paid subscriptions to a wiki site. The preliminary version supports PayPal and manual adjustment by site admins, but other payment methods could be added.

The access-restriction is being accomplished by a combination of MediaWiki site settings and W3TPL, and is very flexible.

Necessity
MediaWiki extensions currently available for interacting with PayPal seem to be limited to displaying static PayPal buttons, which can also be done using W3TPL and other extensions capable of displaying linked external images. This extension makes it possible to receive and process Instant Payment Notifications from PayPal.

In the long run, it may make sense for these two functions (managing subscriptions and handling PayPal IPN) to be split into separate modules.

Pages

 * /tables: data design, including SQL to create tables
 * /code: PHP code of the extension

Status
This extension is in alpha: some hand-coding will probably be needed in order to work with your installation, and steps necessary for configuration have not yet been documented.

Functionality

 * TO DO: allow admins more fine-grained control of subscription expiration (change the date rather than just extend to today plus one year)
 * TO DO: show logs & related info for selected subscriber

History

 * 2009-02-15 ssub_post, ssub_post_line tables designed
 * 2009-04-03 working alpha code finally posted, but there are a lot of rough edges