Hi,

I've signed up with Bryght as a reseller and am excited about what this platform promises for building sites. I've just started a “Proof Of Concept” (POC) process to evaluate whether Bryght will satisfy the requirements for one of my clients.

This client is a publisher that wants to upgrade their site to a more “state of the art” platform. Here's a few points about them:

1. They publish a printed version of their publication quarterly.

2. The current website allows customers to sign up for paid subscriptions of online access to content and archives. Optionally, customers can also pay more to receive the printed publication. 

3. The site also allows professionals to take “Continuing Medical Education” (CME) tests that provide points toward continuing education requirements.

The requirements for this site are going to be similar to any site that provides a mix of free and premium content. It looks like the Bryght platform meets many of these, but not all of them just yet. I assume (but confirmation would be good) that you guys are working toward this full capability. Just to add a bit more precision to this conversation, I have a list of specific requirements I'd like to get comment on.

General Questions:

1. Flexibility to Customize: There's going to be places where we need to customize behavior with code. In general, how flexible is your platform in this regard? What limitations to custom coding exist?

2. Database: Is it possible to add custom tables that integrate with the base drupal tables? Can I access the tables with an SQL tool?

Specific Questions:

1. User Profile Customization: It looks like there is support for adding more profile fields, but how flexible is this? For example, we will want a field “Expiration Date” that indicates when the users subscription expires. This field should be readable, but not editable by the user. Additionally, I can imagine the need for other profile attributes we might want to be invisible to the user.

2. Subscriptions Signup & Renewal: I see Bryght has a “new user” registration process, but how flexible is this? For example, we will need to insert pages to present subscription options and payment handling. Additionally, the user experience would need to be slightly different when the user needs to renew an expired subscription. What would be involved in implementing this behavior? I would hope to hear this would be standard behavior at some point (since it's needed for any premium content seller).

3. Custom Flow Control: Another custom behavior we'd need it for the checking of the users “expiration date” when they log in. If they're subscription has expired, we need to redirect the flow to the registration page offering to let them renew.

4. Background Jobs: Another requirement is to periodically (daily?) check expriation dates to send reminder emails to subscribers that their subscription is about to expire.

5. Mail Merge: We will need the ability to send (both manual and automated) emails (newsletters for example) to registered users. This would also need to be able to select the mailing list based on user profile attributes (ie., doctors, guest users, premium content users, etc.).

6. Data & Content Migration: We have user data and lots of content that needs to be migrated to the Bryght platform. How do you a accommodate this? Can we access the database tables to import user profile data? Is there a way to bulk load (FTP) files. We have lots of archived issues of the publication (in both PDF and HTML). How would be migrate this?

7. Forums: The Drupal forums experience seems a bit lacking when compared to  something like phpBB. Do you guys have plans to improve this situation? I know I've seen other discussions on this on the drupal site.