The demo site offers three sample subscription plans: A Guest plan, a Paid plan, and a Special Offer plan (requires promotion code: 119575)

Guest Plans do not require any payment information to be entered during the registration process.  When a subscription expires you continue to have an account that you can login with, but the account won’t have sufficient privileges to view restricted content.  In this case, you can resubscribe to the Guest account again using the same plan.

By contrast, the Paid Subscription plan does require payment information to be entered during the registration process.  Since this site is running Suma in demo mode, Suma communicates with PayPal’s Sandbox (test-only) environment.  Therefore you can use any of the following fictitious credit card numbers.  Unfortunately you won’t be able to use the Express Checkout option (i.e. paying with your PayPal account) due to the way PayPal setup their test accounts. To do so would require you to login to the buyer PayPal account setup in our Sandbox account and that would require you logging into our Sandbox testing account in PayPal (sorry, but that would give you admin priviledges in our test account).  However, you can always download and install Suma in your own Wordpress installation and configure it with your own PayPal test account (creating buyer and seller accounts as you need).

The Special Offer Plan offered here is a Guest Plan but could easily have been a Paid Plan.  The Special Offer plan demonstrates the ability to restrict plans to individuals who are given a promotional code.

Some other elements of the Demo site worth noting:

The Subscription / Registration Page

• The User Registration forms are all dynamically generated for you by Suma so they won’t interfere with your regular posts and pages, and they are all hosted within your site’s theme so users are reassured and not distracted by a change in style.  All of this is automatic; no coding required at all!  Truly a Wordpress plugin!
• Subscription plans can be in various currencies (US dollar, Canadian dollar, Hong Kong dollar, Yen, etc)
• Although not shown, subscription plans can include initial fees, be of fixed duration, and even place the new Wordpress user into a role other than Subscriber (e.g. Author, Contributor, even Administrator if you’re game).
• Subscribers to a Suma-enabled site are required to agree to the Terms and Conditions of Use of the site as part of the registration process.  (This is just my personal advice, but if you are going to enter into financial arrangements with people you really ought to have a contract in place to define the relationship, particularly if a dispute or misunderstanding should arise!)  This page is automatically generated based on the website’s settings and can be customized or even replaced entirely with your own.  (Ofcourse I make no representation that this generic contract will meet your particular needs.  I mention this only to show you that this aspect of the registration process is supported by Suma. )
• Once subscribed, you’ll see that your user account management area is also hosted within your site’s theme (not the dashboard theme).  Again, no coding required, but if you wish to customize these pages you can.

Post and Page Visibility

• You’ll notice that some Posts, like this one that you’re reading, are entirely visible to the public.  Some other posts (like this one) have their visibility restricted when fetched by non-subscribers.  This is all automated by Suma.  All you need to do is select the visibility level you want when you are editing the post (or page) in Wordpress.
• Searching of restricted content is allowed, but the content from the matching posts and pages is not displayed.  For instance, search for the keyword Lorem (from the phrase Lorem ipsum dolor sit ame).  This text exists in many of the restricted posts and you will thus see those listed in the search results, but you’ll not be able to read the content.

Other useful features available but not utilized in this website include:

• customizable HTML styles (via CSS).  Suma’s generated forms all use CSS which allows you to customize the colors, fonts, layout sizes, etc of these forms to suit your website’s theme.
• ability to change the default HTML Suma displays when a Post, Page, Comment or Author Link has been restricted.  The default reads “Viewing the remainder of this article requires a Subscription”.  You can change this to anything you want.
• Some key PHP functions of Suma are exposed so you can hook in your code.  For instance, your code can query Suma to determine if the current user is a current paid-up subscriber, and if so enable a set of widgets or other functionality that should only be provided to subscribers.