The Citizen Advocacy Center publishes a quarterly newsletter to hundreds of subscribers. With my help, they made the move to on-line publishing. Now, they save money on printing and distribution, and get information to their subscribers ASAP.

The new site allows CAC to do several things:

• Share some information with the public at large (for example, the table of contents of a newsletter), while restricting other content (the newsletter itself) to paid subscribers.
• Sell newsletters either individually or by yearly subscription.
• Allow visitors to purchase newsletters or reserve seats at the annual meeting via PayPal.
• Easily update the event calendar, and the rest of the site, by themselves at any hour of the day or night.

Editing Subscription BehaviorCAC offers a unique subscription model, and implementing it was an interesting challenge. At any time, the 4 most recent newletters are available only to paid subscribers. While the previous (archived) newsletters are available to the general public. Purchasing a subscription gives access to those restricted newsletters and the next 4 to be published in the future. To implement this I introduced a concept of credits. When a newsletter is published, users with credits automatically "spend" one credit to gain access to the new newsletter. This is behind the scenes to the subscriber, but site administrators have an interface to manually grant or revoke credits.