Pro Sites

Pro Sites lets you create your own profitable blog network, like Edublogs.org or WordPress.com. Offer your users the chance to upgrade their blogs and access features like premium themes, plugins, extra storage, domain mapping or removing advertising.

Offer Premium Services

Pro Sites lets you easily charge your network users for premium services such as:

Advertising – Allows you to disable ads for a Pro Site level, or give a Pro Site level the ability to disable ads on a number of other sites.
Bulk Upgrades – Allows you to sell Pro Site level upgrades in bulk packages.
Limit BuddyPress Features – Allows you to limit BuddyPress group creation and messaging to users of a Pro Site.
Limit Publishing – Allows you to only enable writing posts and/or pages for selected Pro Site levels.
Pay to Blog – Allows you to completely disable a site both front end and back until paid.
Post/Page Quotas – Allows you to limit the number of post types that can be published for selected Pro Site levels.
Premium Plugins – Allows you to create plugin packages only available to selected Pro Site levels.
Premium Themes – Allows you to give access to selected themes to a Pro Site level.
Premium Support – Allows you to provide a premium direct to email support page for selected Pro Site levels.
Upload Quota – Allows you to give additional upload space to Pro Sites.
Restrict XML-RPC – Allows you to only enable XML-RPC and Atom Publishing for selected Pro Site levels.
Unfiltered HTML – Allows you provide the “unfiltered_html” permission to specific user types for selected Pro Site levels.

You can also extend Pro Sites even further by integrating it with many of our popular plugins, including:

MarketPress
Google Analytics
Affiliate
Forums
Membership
Additional Tags

We developed Pro Sites for the oldest and one of the most successful WordPress Multisite networks on the web – Edublogs. We’ve got over 1,000,000 blogs on Edublogs and Pro Sites makes it all possible.

What’s New?

Pro Sites is an upgrade of the WPMU DEV Supporter plugin. Check out some of the new features:

Offer different upgrade levels
Create coupons
New stats
Front-end checkout
PayPal Express and Pro Gateways
NEW Stripe gateway!

The Features

Pro-Site Levels

The new Pro Site levels feature lets you create a tiered approach to your network membership. You can add as many levels as you want. For example, you could have your levels set up as follows:

Basic
Pro
Elite

This gives you maximum flexibility and should maximize your profits.

Premium Themes

Users have an extra menu item under Appearance -‘Premium Themes’ (they’ll also see it under their new ‘Pro Sites’ menu). Under this menu they will be able to view and test out all of your premium themes. But they’ll only be able to actually use them if they sign up.

Premium Plugins

Charge for functionality as well as design. You can make any plugin premium only. Just select from the plugins you have installed on your site, choose which ones you want to be ‘Premium.’

BuddyPress Integration

With Pro Sites you can limit the group creation and messaging BuddyPress functions to paid members only. Users can sign up, participate in groups, and generally enjoy your site but if they want to start their own groups or message other users then they have to upgrade. We’re happy to build in more BuddyPress upgrade features too – just become a WPMU DEV Premium member and request them at the forums!

And that’s not all

If we were to go on and on about every feature in this plugin we’d never stop – so here’s a brief overview of just some of the other features you’ll find in Supporter:

Rename and rebrand Pro Sites to anything you want
Offer free trials to give your users a taste of what they can expect
Create your own customized payment screen
Track your subscriptions with powerful statistics
Individual blog modification tools - manually extend, process refunds, cancellations, everything!
Use a global widget to show off all your Pro sites
Sandbox option for you to test out PayPal
Write your own sales copy and integrate with the plugin.

And of course we’re improving this all the time… so feel free to drop by the forums any time to request extra features!

About Pro Sites

The Pro Sites plugin is designed for users to pay for additional features for their site. The idea is you offer features that make them want to sign up for a paid site rather than use a free site. We refer to the paid blog as a ‘pro site’ and the free blog as a ‘non-pro site’ however you can change it’s name on the Settings page in Network Admin > Pro Sites > Settings. Pro Sites is per site, not per user. When they sign up for a single Pro subscription, the dashboard they are logged into when they subscribe is the site that is upgraded, and Pro features are only applied to that site, so if they are a member of another site they will not see Pro features on that site.

Important! Update from the Supporter Plugin

Pro Sites is a major upgrade for the Supporter plugin. To upgrade to Pro Sites you must follow the following steps:

1. Backup your Database (optional, but highly recommended!) At the very least make a quick dump of your supporter_* tables just in case.

2. Delete Supporter Files You must delete all of the old Supporter files from wp-content/mu-plugins/

3. Move PayPal or Amazon Backwards Compatibility IPN Handlers These must be moved to your web root from the /pro-sites/pro-sites-files/gateways/backwards-compatibility/ folder. If you fail to do this older Pro Sites won’t be be upgraded when their subscription payments come through from the old gateways.

4. ConfigureOnce you have installed Pro Sites you will need to configure the plugin right away. Most of the settings from the Supporter plugin will not carry over.

Walk-through

Check out our introductory video to help get you started with Pro Sites.

To install:

Download the plugin file
Unzip the file into a folder on your hard drive
Upload the /pro-sites/ folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder on your site

Visit Network Admin -> Plugins and Network Activate the plugin.

To Configure

You will need to take some time to configure Pro Sites correctly.

Levels

Pro Sites lets you create unlimited levels of subscriptions. You should plan these out beforehand, deciding what you wish to give to each level. It is easy to add a new level. Just insert the name and the different prices. You can also un-check payment options that you don’t want to offer, like “12 Months”.

Settings

You can use the settings to re-brand Pro Sites, add free trials and create email notifications.

Enable Modules

Navigate to Pro Sites > Modules/Gateways to choose which modules you wish to use. These are:

Advertising – Allows you to disable ads for a Pro Site level, or give a Pro Site level the ability to disable ads on a number of other sites.
Bulk Upgrades – Allows you to sell Pro Site level upgrades in bulk packages.
Limit BuddyPress Features – Allows you to limit BuddyPress group creation and messaging to users of a Pro Site.
Limit Publishing – Allows you to only enable writing posts and/or pages for selected Pro Site levels.
Pay to Blog – Allows you to completely disable a site both front end and back until paid.
Post/Page Quotas – Allows you to limit the number of post types for selected Pro Site levels. You can use this, for example, to limit the number of Products or Wikis a Pro site is able to create.
Premium Plugins – Allows you to create plugin packages only available to selected Pro Site levels.
Premium Support – Allows you to provide a premium direct to email support page for selected Pro Site levels.
Premium Themes – Allows you to give access to selected themes to a Pro Site level.
Restrict XML-RPC – Allows you to only enable XML-RPC and Atom Publishing for selected Pro Site levels.
Unfiltered HTML – Allows you provide the “unfiltered_html” permission to specific user types for selected Pro Site levels. This will let Pro level sites utilize a wider array of HTML content
Upload Quota – Allows you to give additional upload space to Pro Sites.

Note: If you add the Premium Plugins and Premium Themes they will get their own menu items. All of the other modules will appear under Pro Sites > Settings. Each of the modules has an individual settings box for you to tweak all of the options.

Choose Payment Gateways

Navigate to Pro Sites > Modules/Gateways and choose whether you want to use Manual Payments or PayPal.

Subscription Selection

With Pro Sites configured, users will be able to upgrade their site to a Pro level via the Pro Sites sidebar option in their Admin dashboard or by clicking the Pro Sites link in the Admin bar. Pro Sites displays a table of subscriptions with the site’s current level highlighted for easy reference. Pro Sites Subscription Table

Important notes about Pro Sites levels

When setting up and working with Pro Sites levels, there are a few things to keep in mind, as follows:

Free levels – When new sites are created, they are technically Free. You can remove this Free site functionality by enabling the Pay to Blog module.
Downgrades – When users downgrade a site’s level, Pro Sites creates a new subscription at lower rate. Their level will drop when the next scheduled payment (lesser) comes through.
Upgrades – When a site’s level is upgraded, the difference is calculated automatically by the plugin and the date of their next payment is adjusted to take into account any balance from the previous subscription. Basically, it’s pro-rated by time and this is done because when upgrading you want them to immediately have access to the higher level.

Advanced: If you need to run Pro Sites on multiple WP installs but with the same PayPal account, you will need to setup an IPN forwarding script. This is due to limitations in the PayPal APIs regarding subscriptions and only being able to set one IPN url in PayPal settings. Instructions for this can be found here.

WPMU DEV

See Pro Sites screenshots

Detail