Membrepress and scheduled courses – is this doable?

Hi,

Trying to figure out what membership plugin can enable what I am trying to do.

I have courses that I want to start on certain date, and then there will be weekly lessons, each starting on set date. The course duration is 3 months, 12 lessons. I want users to have first week free, then a payment, then after 3 month course duration they retain access for a year.

I can sort of set this up if I understand the Memberpress docs correctly, since I see that I can have recurring subscription, set to one free 7 day trial, limit payment cycles to one, and set recurring period to 3 months, then set expire 1 year after the first payment cycle ends.

But I will advertise the courses before the start date and want people to be able to sign up in advance. Before course starts they won’t have access, they will be waiting for the course to open, and so I am trying to figure out if there are any membership plugins that can allow a subscription of this sort to be done, and for the subscription start date to be set for the course start date.

In other words, say course starts 1 Jan 2022 and they sign up on 1 Dec 2021. In that case I need subscription to start 1 Jan 2022, and in meantime for them to simply see message on course page about course not being opened yet. I can handle that sort of message customization, I am just trying to see if any of the well functioning membership plugins (be it Memberpress, Paid Memberships Pro, etc) can work as I need them to.

Now I know I can just use 2 one time bought memberships (one free, one at cost) with these plugins, but I am specifically trying to setup a trial period subscription with specified subscription start date.

Also, what I am trying to do suggests drip content. From what I read in Memberpress docs, when you set up drip, you are using a rule. But if someone has a subscription/membership and the content isn’t ready to be dripped yet, I don’t want them to have some unauthorized redirect. I just want them to still have access to the course/lesson, but to simply see that it is not dripped yet. So I am also looking for plugin that can drip content but not force unauthorized messages. In the case of dripping, I need them to still have course access so that I can render the course or lesson page accordingly and control what is displayed.

Thoughts?

• This topic was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Everything else WordPress topic