I am really trying to figure out if there is a somewhat easy way to have a subscription or paid access to a MT site or certain posts. I have seen the privacy plug-ins, but the only way I can figure it out would be to have the user sign up for some sort of OpenID account, paypal me w/ that account name attached, me add them to the allow to view list, and there it is. Which is very not automated and very sloppy. Is there anything out there that can do this or do it more efficiently? I really want to use MT as I love the software, but if I have to use Drupal or something to accomplish this, then I guess i will have no choice...

There is nothing out of the box though I have drawn up something out for a client. It has not been implemented. The solution is not trivial, but I suspect that if you like MT then you would prefer this solution.

The trick is to use aMember and integrate it with MT in one of two ways.

One way is to have MT publish to directories that aMember protect your use authentication service using an .htaccess that it will generate. This is the easiest and most straight forward way that requires little customization, but your options are a bit limited in that you can't use it to protect just comments or display an excerpt and registration form if a user is not a subscriber. Pages are either protected or not.

The second way is more powerful and involved. It would mean using the Plugin API that aMember provides and having it update the MT user database. You would still need to use some type of dynamic page generation to do the different views of the content based on subscriber/non-subscriber status.

Hope that helps.