Today Endevver is happy to announce the availability of a new plugin for Movable Type and Melody that helps users quickly create and deploy a digital store front to their web site. Unlike many of its counterparts available on other platforms, this plugin is completely free and open source. Just download, install, and presto: you a fully functional e-commerce store front that integrates directly with PayPal of your payment backend of choice.

Furthermore, the plugin helps users manage not only products to offer for sale, but also subscriptions to collect recurring payments from your customers and visitors. This opens the door for bloggers and publishers to easily offer paid-memberships to the content on their blog or web site.

(more screenshots found in our documentation)

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 also supports these many features:

• Create, manage and sell merchandise on your web site.
• Manage and enforce inventory limits.
• Create subscriptions and accept recurring payments from your visitors.
• View and manage payments directly from within the CMS.
• Associate purchases and subscriptions to Movable Type users.

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.

We at Endevver are very excited by the release of this plugin and can't wait to see what the Movable Type and Melody communities will build with it.