Hikashop support

I have found a forum entry from two years ago that Membership Pro has no built in support for Hikashop. That's fine, both programs are extendable, and I have quite a bit of experience with extending Hikashop, but have barely begun using Membership Pro. I'm planning two different sites that could benefit from running both software packages.

One site would need a checkout plugin for Hikashop that would process a purchased item(s) by using Hikashop info to create a Membership Pro Subscription(s). (This would be used for an "Item of the Month" renewable annual subscription.) During processing, the Hikashop plugin would have all of the item's information as well as access to customer info and any product custom fields the item includes - such as a destination address for a gift subscription. At first glance, all I would need to do is have the plugin execute during checkout to create a Membership Pro `_subscribers` record, and possibly a set of `_field_value` records to hold the custom values provided by the product. Hikashop would create a Joomla User and Profile records (if needed) , as well as a standard Hikashop invoice record.

On the other site, Hikashop and Membership Pro would operate independently of each other (no Subscriptions being sold through Hikashop.) And I don't expect any overlapping use of any User Groups (other than the 'Registered' group).

The major difficulty I see (so far) is that I greatly prefer Membership Pro's User Profile editing tools. They seem to be more stable and user-friendly. However, my first efforts at configuring them together has shown me that the Membership Pro User editing pages will only edit Users who own at least one Membership Pro subscription.

I hope for the Membership Pro profile pages to be able to edit the User and Profile information of:
Members registered by Joomla,
Members registered by Hikashop,
Members registered by Membership Pro.

The User and Profile records all seem to be standard Joomla stuff, with no customization by any of the software packages. I suspect I need to shuffle around tests within the template that check whether the User has any Subscriptions, make an allowance or two for those which don't.

Are my assumptions here accurate? Do you have any suggestions? Are there any required records I'm overlooking?

Thanks.

Hi Tom

Thanks for using our Membership Pro extension. Below are my answers to your questions/problems:

1. I don't think you should create a subscription record when users process checkout in Hikashop. You should only create the subscription for user when the order in Hikashop completed (ie, after payment processed).

2. The integration between Membership Pro and Hikashop is only doable if your plan is one time subscription plan. If it is a recurring subscription plans, I am afraid of it is not possible. The reason is because for recurring subscriptions, the payment gateway (PayPal or Stripe...) needs to notify Membership Pro when a recurring payment happens so that Membership Pro can extend the subscription for user... and it is not doable if users purchase subscription via Hikashop

3. I am really sorry that at the moment, we don't have an easy way to create a subscription in Membership Pro. Some kind of API should be available in the future, so as you figured out, you would have to insert data manually to #__osmembership_subscribers table and #__osmembership_field_value table. Hopefully, I will have an API for doing that easily in 4 to 6 weeks as I still have other items I want to work on it

4. For editing user profile, I think the easiest way would be customize the code of profile view in Membership Pro:

- If user has subscription, then use membership pro profile page
- If no subscription and has order, redirect users o Hikashop profile page (I am not sure if the page exists, I have never looked at that extension)
- Otherwise, redirect to Joomla core user profile

I don't know if it is easy to do everything in Membership pro profile

The other workaround might be create a Free Subscription Plan (could be lifetime plan) and use the plugin User - Membership Pro so that when a user account is created in Joomla (via any extensions). a subscription record for the user for the free plan above will be created. By doing that, everyone would have a profile record in membership pro and you can then user Membership Pro profile page which you like

Tuan

Hi Tuan,

1) Yes, Hika's "payment processed" trigger is the system trigger I intended to use.

2) OK, I understand this (and had not thought of it before.) I've been poking around a little and found an old Hikashop forum thread. Apparently, Hika has tinkered with this for years, using Akeeba Subscriptions (which is no longer officially supported.) The strategy they used was for Hikashop to use the payment processor to make the initial payment, and then use the Akeeba routines to establish the recurring payment, beginning at the end of the first period. There are now at least two other systems that create recurring purchase for Hika: I suspect they work the same way. I will see what I can learn about their Hikashop support plugins.

3) I'm glad to hear that you have plans for an API for Membership Pro. That sound very beneficial. If my schedule allows, I would be happy to help test it when it is ready.

4) I suspected it would start with a template modification. I will explore this and let you know what accomplish.

I see that there is more research I need to do on the payment gateways (verifying an active recurring payment status, etc.) Thank you for your help.

OK Tom. Please continue with your integration and if you have questions, just ask. I will try to answer as much as I can

BTW, Akeeba Subscription although not offical supported,I think it is still on the development (as the developer uses it on his own site and other developers use it, too). So if that integration is supported out of the box, maybe you can give it a try, too (although the code of Akeeba Subscriptions look quite complicated in case you want to customize)

Tuan