Phase one of the website will not include e-commerce (i.e. paid membership) but the BIT team wants to restrict access to some parts of the site, including the full Best Practices documents and the forum. This means we'll need a rudimentary paywall, directing users to register for full access. Current registered users of BuildingGreen and LEEDuser (AKA "basic members") will not have automatic access to all BITuser content.
We need to decide how this access will be granted. One proposal on Friday 2/9 was to have users register on bitbuilding.org, and then give them a BITuser access code through Salesforce.
Although the forum will be off-limits to the general public, I propose making the forum index page visible (at least once it has steady traffic). This will give unregistered users a sense of what's being provided without giving access to the full discussion. You can see what I mean by looking at these pages on LEEDuser:
- Forum index (I propose this would be visible to everyone)
- Individual discussion thread (hidden from public)
Note that the LEEDuser forum index shows only a preview of the full question, unlike the private forum we're using now (which shows the full post on the index page).
This is just a suggestion -- during this early project phase I'll probably throw out a lot of ideas just to things flowing.
