Suma Plugin

For those that are curious about such matters, Suma was built by myself (Brenton Camac).  I’m a software engineer who specializes in custom website development and systems administration for small companies. In 2007 a client of mine needed a subscription-based pay-to-view website. I determined that Wordpress would suit her needs well and so went about evaluating the various technology, products and plugins available.  I even prototyped a solution consisting of several plugins combined.  But I was not completely satisfied with any of these for one reason and another. So I decided to develop myself what I needed and at the same time fill a void in the marketplace.

The design and initial development of Suma took 6 months.  Then for another 12 months I had Suma in the market but kept “under the radar” (no advertising) so as to receive valuable feedback from real customers in real scenarios. I call it real world validation, where you get to see what the rest of the world thinks of your product.  Plus, you get to see how customers use the product which sometimes is quite different from what it was designed for.  Having worked for various software companies and pure research organizations in the past I am convinced that the best R&D laboratories around are your customer’s businesses.  They are the ones who know better than anyone what a great product would look like (at least for them – and ultimately, that’s who matters).

From that feedback and the many in-depth conversations I had with website developers and business owners came a much deeper insight into the business of blog-based commerce than I could ever have conceived of on my own. Consequently, I spent Sept 2009 to January 2010 redesigning the architecture and fundamental principals of Suma to be flexible, adaptable and aligned with the needs of small business owners seeking to utilize Wordpress for paid-access content delivery.

The result is the modest Suma 3.0. In these early releases the functionality will not seem dramatically different from Suma 2.x versions. However, its new architecture has laid the ground work to be able to add more payment processors (not just PayPal), to allow Suma’s dynamically generated forms to be customizable, and to allow developers to extend Suma even more to suit their own particular business requirements.

Suma’s development and maintenance is a full-time endeavor for me; one thats engaged me now for over two years, and which I enjoy immensely. It is also my primary source of income so please forgive me if I am so crass as to have to charge for the product and services but its a practical necessity for me that I do so.

I’m always interested to hear from other developers and business owners about the projects they’re working on and how Suma can help and I especially like hearing feature suggestions or about any other technology you’re considering. You can reach me directly at b1@camacit.com.

And yes, there is a story to the name Suma.  It was the project code-name I had been using with that earlier client.  It was a short-hand way for me to label the Subscription Management component of the project (SUbscription MAnagment).

Cheers,
Brenton Camac

Architect and Developer
Suma Plugin for Wordpress