I’m looking for straight up honest opinions. Is Treepl a great platform to create an image subscription service website? Or am I going have to do programming hacks to make it work?
I want to be able to have clients download images based on subscription limits.
All customers can see available higher level images with watermarks, but not be able to download them without increasing their subscription level.
And not show or download images restricted to zip codes. In other words if someone wants exclusively to download images in their area then others in certain zip codes are not able to access, I have not thought through this feature but I’m interested to know if it is possible with much programming.
Should I be using this platform or am I better off with a photography website. The only thing with not wanting to use a photography website is that many of them lack a lot of other features within Treepl.
Suggestions? Ideas?
Will my requirements require a programmer? I just know some basics.
Hi @Mstall
Since that particular use case is not a specific feature in Treepl, you would therefore need some level of custom programming.
How much depends on the exact requirements needed.
Out-of-the-box, Treepl can do digital products via the eCommerce functionality with secure links to the download (via email). So at a basic level, it would probably achieve 80% of your requirements. But the remaining 20% I would say would need custom Liquid coding and probably some other creative solutions.
The main problem would be how to truly secure the download file so only authorised and qualifying users can download it. While the eCommerce functionality can do this, it may not be the most user-friendly process.
Restricting items by zip code would be fairly simple using Liquid as long as you had a solid way of confirming their zip code. So you’d likely need to collect that info during signup and not allow them to change it (without an address change confirmation).
The other thing which may be an issue is the search capabilities within Treepl. I’d assume such a site would need fairly robust searching for images.
While you can search by categories, tags and any other custom field, it doesn’t perform well just with keywords/phrases or natural language type search inputs.
In summary, IMO, it would be possible (with custom dev) but probably not the most robust solution.
But in saying that, I don’t know what systems there are that could offer this solution or what their features and functionality are.
Usually, projects like this turn out to be far more complex than they appear on the surface so if there are dedicated solutions out there for this use case, I’d probably opt for that. So long as they provide all the features you need (and may need to grow into).
Else, a custom solution in Treepl could be possible with some extra work and creativity and would allow for more custom growth later.
You could also consider contacting Treepl Services to see if they are interested in such a custom implementation.