NATS4 Upgrade Plus
Upgrade Plus is a feature in NATS4 that allows you to potentially shorten a Member's Trial by offering them incentives to upgrade in your Members Area. If the member chooses to opt out of their free trial with Upgrade Plus, you will need to update your member records after they complete the upgrade.
To do this, you can give the following link to your users in order to upgrade them:
http://<linkdomain>/signup/upgradeplus.php?site=<siteid>&username=<username>
Replace <linkdomain> with the site's actual linkdomain, then replace <siteid> with the site's NATS site I.D. number. Finally you must replace <username> with the user's NATS username.
Using Custom Passthroughs (Available in NATS 4.1.17.2 & up)
In addition, you can update custom 1-10 fields during the upgradeplus page in two ways: 1.) Including a hidden variable "upgrade_vars[custom1]" on your upgrade template (gateway_upgrade/thirdparty_upgrade depending on biller(s) used). Example:
<input type="hidden" name="upgrade_vars[custom1]" value="test">
2.) Build a full submit url which passes in the 'upgrade_vars[custom1]' parameter. Example:
http://<linkdomain>/signup/upgradeplus.php?site=<siteid>&username=<username>&submit=1&email=XXXX@XXXX.com&upgrade_vars[custom1]=test
For both provided examples, the member record's 'custom1' field value would be updated to be "test". You can set custom1 - custom10 fields.
Username
In NATS, you can replace <username> with <?=$_SERVER['REMOTE_USER']?>. In CARMA, you can replace <username> with {$username}.
Updating Member Records
After the biller upgrades the member, you need to update their account in your system. This means they probably need to login again.
If you use MySQL Auth in your Server to authenticate members using the NATS members table, you can add an additional check to see if a member is in their trial or full membership and give them the right access respectively. Go to the Sites Admin and enter the the login page URL in the Upgrade Approval URL field or set up a Upgrade Approval Template that re-logs in the user.
If you use your own user management system, you can use the Upgrade Post URL to send upgrade notifications to your own scripts. Your scripts should mark the member as upgrade. If your system requires the user to log in again, use the Upgrade Approval URL or Upgrade Approval Template as described above.
Multiple Sites
If you have your Member's Area shared across multiple sites and can't be sure which site the member is coming from, you can send a comma separated list of siteids instead of just one. To do this, use the siteids field instead of the site field. Be advised: If you have a member that belongs to multiple sites with the same username, NATS may not retrieve the correct member. In this situation, you should send the specific siteid of the member attempting to upgrade.
http://<linkdomain>/signup/upgradeplus.php?siteids=<siteid1>,<siteid2>&username=<username>
Replace <siteid1> with the first site's NATS site I.D. number, <siteid2> with the I.D. of the second site, etc. Replace <username> with the user's NATS username. Replace <linkdomain> with the site's linkdomain.
If you are using Epoch and this may be an epoch member, you will want to append this a returnurl field for epoch.
http://<linkdomain>/signup/upgradeplus.php?siteids=<siteid1>,<siteid2>&username=<username>&returnurl=http://<linkdomain>/signup/epoch_upgradeplus_returnurl.php
If a non-Epoch member uses the the upgrade URL above, NATS removes the Return URL field and only sends the information needed.
Additional Security
As of NATS4.1, Upgrade Plus offers additional security features that you can use to further secure your member upgrades. The MEMBER_STRING_AUTH_UPGRADEPLUS variable allows you to choose whether or not you wish to use the new member auth strings, which contain a variety of information and are designed to prevent unwanted upgrade attempts by outside sources.
This feature will be set to off by default. If you want to enable this feature for your Upgrade Plus transactions, you can add the following necessary code to the config.php script on your NATS server:
$config['MEMBER_STRING_AUTH_UPGRADEPLUS'] = 1;
This will activate the MEMBER_STRING_AUTH_UPGRADEPLUS setting to use additional security for your member authorization strings. Do not add the provided code if you want to leave this feature disabled.
Once you have activated this setting, you must use the get_member_instant_upgrade_string API call to get the correct auth string for the member you want to upgrade. Please see our API Get Member Instant Upgrade String wiki article for more information on this process.
This function will return the auth string necessary for members to get authenticated for the Upgrade Plus process. Include the auth string in the link for your member, and they will be able to perform an instant upgrade using Upgrade Plus using the MEMBER_STRING_AUTH_UPGRADEPLUS setting.
http://<linkdomain>/signup/upgradeplus.php?site=<siteid>&username=<username>&authstring=<authstring>
Throttling
Throttling is a security setting available in NATS4.1, which allows you to lock out surfers for a specified period of time if they make too many attempts on certain pages in NATS.
You can use the Throttling feature to help secure your upgradeplus.php page, preventing surfers from forcing transactions without the correct auth string. Just go to the "Security" configuration page, found in the Configuration Admin.
For more information on this feature, please see our Throttling wiki article.
More Detailed information on the page
- {list_tours full=1 site=$member.siteid} Populates the tours array with detailed information
- $tours[$member.tourid] will be an array of all the tour data, such as link domain, etc, as specified for list tours
