Paid membership tiers and one-click downloads for a document library

The challenge

A French web agency was building a document-download store for a veterinary client. The store ran on MijoShop, which embeds OpenCart inside a Joomla website, and already used a custom template and a free-download extension.

The client wanted to sell yearly memberships. Each membership tier would give its holders a discount on documents, up to 100% for the top tier, so premium members could download everything for free. Memberships had to lapse cleanly at the end of the year, members needed fair warning before that happened, and documents made up of several files had to be easy to download in one go.

What we did

• Paid membership groups. We supplied our paid customer group extension and configured it for the site, so customers can buy a yearly membership that moves them into a discounted group.
• Template compatibility. We adapted the extension to the store's custom template and to the MijoShop environment inside Joomla.
• Expiry handling. Members receive a reminder email the day before their membership expires, triggered by a daily scheduled task, and are moved back to the default customer group automatically when it ends.
• Control over the upgrade table. We added an option to hide selected groups from the membership upgrade table, so the agency can decide which tiers are on sale.
• Free downloads for top-tier members. We resolved a conflict with the existing free-download extension, so products discounted by 100% for members can be downloaded directly without going through a paid checkout.
• One-click ZIP downloads. We built a feature that packages every file attached to a product into a single ZIP for download.
• Installation and handover. We installed everything on the agency's test site, then supplied a clean, separated set of files for production.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart (MijoShop), Joomla, vQmod, cron