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An Online Subscription Magazine – How to Power It?

Suppose you want to produce an online magazine. 12 issues per year, each issue would be "self contained" and may even follow the paper model rather than the porn model: you only get issues when you're subscribed, but you can buy back issues ((The "porn model" is "sign up and when your subscription is active, download as much as you want from the archives. Or so I'm told in looking into it today… there's no arguing that porn seems to be one of the most successful models.)).

Articles would contain videos and photos, but not be super media heavy (i.e. no super-whiz-bang HTML 5 style stuff).

What software would you use to power this? How would you do it?

You could make PDFs, which have the advantage of being able to nicely control layout, etc. Plus each "issue" feels like an "issue" and not just a collection of web pages that happened to be released at the same time.

Or perhaps you could do that - release a series of web pages with a table of contents. It'd certainly make embedding videos easier. People could get teasers, too, that prompts them to subscribe if they're not logged in and/or subscribing already.

But even with either of those options (or a third, unknown better option), what software do you use to power it? WordPress with a customized or paid-for-and-configured plugin or two?

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