Good news for online publishers today: The company Endevver has announced the availability of a new plugin for the Movable Type content management system to enable subscription-focused e-commerce functionality. In their announcement, they describe the plugin as a general-use e-commerce platform, but what is really interesting are the features that speak to subscriptions, specifically:

• Creating subscriptions and accepting recurring payments
• Associating purchases and subscriptions to Web site users (subscriber-only content)
• Support for subscription-focused needs like trial periods, billing frequencies, and subscription fees

In their own words:

We have worked and built subscription based products before so we know just how confusing managing an e-commerce site can be. That is why we have worked so diligently to produce as an intuitive interface as possible. Especially for subscriptions, whose policies around trial periods, billing frequencies, and subscription fees can be very confusing. Using the Store Front plugin administrators can see a human readable description of the subscription model they want to create

The plugin currently supports Paypal, but as Endevver points out:

The Store Front plugin is more than "just a plugin" though - it is a framework that is easily extensible by developers, allowing developers to easily develop drivers for additional payment gateways, as well as giving them the ability to integrate the Store Front plugin into existing systems like Salesforce.com, or another internal billing or CRM solution.

At a time when Movable Type's own developers at Six Apart seem to be distracted by other projects and priorities, it's great to see that other development teams are picking up the slack and continuing to push forward what has historically been a great product. That's open-source software development at work.

In the the last newsletter, I announced an upcoming series of Lunch-and-learn technology presentations for non-profit leaders. The debut session will be on April 27th, with others planned for June, July, October, and November. I’ll be announcing when registration opens for the rest of the events on this list: so if you have a colleague that might benefit from these sessions, please consider sending them a note about it.

The first session in the series — E-commerce: stores, donations, and registrations — will be a fast-and-furious exploration of the options for Canadian organizations that want to accept payments online. Whether it’s as simple as a basic event registration, as critical as a monthly donation, or putting your entire catalogue operation online … you leave having learned something new, and have a sense of where to go next.

To find out more, and to register, visit the event registration page. These events are limited to 12 people — so act fast if you want to attend.