A beginner's question about Mambo & aMember

jmaduk,
You smacked that one out of the park. Nailed every question. Thanks. I have another request for advice. I have created presentations with Articulate Presenter, and I plan to make links from my Joomla site to these presentations. Is there any advantage to having these articles inside my Joomla directory? Otherwise, I planned to place them in another directory, and just protect that directory with aMember.

Thanks again.

Distribution of Multimedia

That's the million dollar question...

Think of it this way..

capture, edit, encode, distribute and then figure out how to manage the subscriptions is how most people approach having/selling multimedia content.

For example you may have captured your presentations, done the edits, encoded them so the are available with articulate... and now are trying out how to distribute them...and keep track of who should have access to them.

It should go this way. ( my 2 cents)

Figure out the how to manage the subscriptions ( AMEMBER OF COURSE ) - then figure out how you want to distribute all of your media over the long term. After you've done that Capture- Edit - Encode with whatever tool supports your business model.

As far as your situation goes it depends on what your longer term goals are. How do you need to distribute your content to support your business?

Are you going to have affiliates?
Offer resale rights?
Digital Download or Physical Products or Both?
Potential Customers on Dialup/Highspeed?
How are you going to protect them? Are you worried about piracy or hotlinking?
Can they be embedded in a page or do they need to be full screen size.

Amember is the answer to the first part - it's the best at managing subscriptions...

but I think you have to answer the questions about how you want to distribute before trying to figure out what kind of way to protect your articulate encoded content. Maybe articulate isn't the best way to create the content?

Just my opinion! If you have more questions I have a number of video courses that explain how all this works

Wow.

I'd love to look at your videos. Here's my situation: my content is purely academic. The Joomla site is an academic site. I need aMember to secure the site so that only alumni of the academic training program have access to the information. The content, forums, etc. are private. But, to get access, they need to pay their alumni dues.

So, aMember does two things: (1) password protection of sensitive information (2) allows me to control whether or not their access to the information "expires" next year when their dues are to be paid again.

I used articulate because I have a huge library of "Grand Round" lectures that were all done in powerpoint. I wanted the lectures available online, and articulate was the best solution: their compression seemed to be the best. I got some 150MB ppt files down to 2-3MB without any huge loss of quality. There were also many other features that made Articulate a good choice, such as the ability to capture live lectures, and make the audio available with the video; the ability to work on collaberative projects and more.

So, my content only needs to be protected- not sold, advertised or transmitted in any way except for that outlined above. I only want the members of this institution to be able to access these files.

Make sense?

Thanks again.

That Will Work.

The setup you suggest will work.

my understanding is that articulate gives you a hyperlink for each presentation and you are adding that link to a page in joomla that requires a registered user (ie amember OK'd subscriber) to login before they can view the page.

Be aware though that since the presentations are hyperlinks to the articlulate presentations that are hosted and running from the articulate servers, anyone that has the link to the presentation can view it. They don't have to login to access it.

The links can be passed around and if an alumnist doesn't renew they can still watch the presentations by accessing a saved link. It's easy enough to just create a bookmark/favorite in your browser for every presentation.

Good luck with your site!
Lovin Joomla and AMember )

James
The One-Stop Shop For Web Marketers

Thanks

Thanks. The presentations do not have to sit on their servers. In fact- I've got a bunch on my server, and I previously was using XXXXXX to protect them- by putting 4 line of code at the front of a file.

Each presentation is in a folder with a number of files. I figure I would put each folder (a presentation) into a specific directory- and just protect that entire directory with aMember.

I think that will work?

Not Logging In

I have installed Joomla plugin and the module, and no matter what I do, when I use the login box, the user is simply not getting logged in. When I unpublish the modue, and use the regular joomla login, the user gets logged in. Somehow, the amember module login box is not communicating properly to joomla that a user is logged in.

any advice out there?

Would really like to hear more on this. Seem to be having a similar problem.

ritholtz.com

test subscription:
uid: mewho
pw: zehwho

aMember sends member to regular Mambo site page - when it works. I have registered pages with attached (static) content in Mambo, and aMember subscriptions also create registered users.

Am I supposed to set the product page in aMember as the Mambo registered menu link url?

Thanks everyone - the sooner the better! :-(

community builder

Any word on Joomla plugin and community builder?

I am building an academic site- manually adding users. So, for me it is very useful. I got it up and running.