Membership and event API? Or should I do it myself?

Question

I've been tasked with setting up a society's website. I'm a full time Django (at al) web developer so I was happy to take on the task.

Going through the specs, they want to control memberships so that all applications need a "second" (read: sponsor, referee, etc) and then they need to pay a subscription fee to be part of the club.

This club has a number of events with variable ticket prices for lunches and talks to name two. Only members are allowed to see the price per ticket and therefore only members are allowed to buy the tickets.

I had originally planned on farming the event management off to EventBrite and pulling the upcoming events back to the website through EB's API but this members-only constraint looks like something EventBrite can't do.

Then there's processing members subscriptions. I had hoped to allow anybody to register a django.contrib.auth account but leave subscription payment offline but the client would be happier if they could mark accounts as "members", store the subscription data in the database and let the members pay online.

Like with EventBrite, I was hoping I could store rough membership data (whether or not they're allowed to subscribe, a unique token for the user on the API service, their level of membership and their membership's expiry) and there'd be something I could post users off to to process their subscription payment.

I basically don't want to touch any payment systems. Even something as simple as Paypal+IPN is something I'd rather not do (I can and have in the past on other projects) but it's the layer of management that I'd have to build around it (messaging members, creating recurring events, etc) that I'd like to farm out to a third party... Even if they do want an additional percent of the payments processed.

Do any of you know any suitable APIs that cover membership or events or both?

Or is this so complex that I should give up hoping for external help and just knuckle down and do it myself?

Answer 1

Give this a try. http://www.paymentsgateway.com/developers/Integration/securewebpay/redirect.aspx

It will let you do recurring transactions, pass you back tokens for your customers and their payment methods.

Answer 2

I think the google search you are looking for is online membership management. I don't know if any of them play particularly nicely with Django/python, but some of them do include APIs. Almost all of these are companies that charge, either for the system, or on a per-user basis.

If you don't mind installing something yourself, CiviCRM is a free, open source solution that I found with a bit of googling. It's integrates with either Joomla or Drupal (so probably PHP-based). You'd have to put the payment processing in yourself, but it does support payments using PayPal which would take handling payments mostly out of the equation. If you can, choose PayPal Express rather than PayPal Website Payments Pro since you may need to be PCI-DSS compliant to use the latter.