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Premium contents behind paywall
On my Textpattern website I publish a weekly podcast. It’s free and available for everyone to listen. I would like to create bi-weekly premium contents and put it behind a paywall. Will Textpattern handle this scenario? Any hint? Thanks.
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Re: Premium contents behind paywall
Depends how you want to control access to it.
smd_access_keys allows you to associate a long random URL to assets or sections of your site. You can either protect stuff with one key or generate one per user in response to some event (e.g. payment). You can also limit the number of downloads per token if you wish.
It doesn’t handle the paying aspect of things – for that you can either set something up by hand to direct to some online payment gateway. When you receive notification, you can send out a token link to the individual content (if it’s going to be a recurring payment) or a link to the access-protected section of your site that contains all the podcasts available to subscribers. Depends how you want to process it.
If you’re likely to get too much traffic to be able to process things by hand, you can use a shopping cart solution such as yab_shop and/or hook up PayPal to respond to instant payment notifications automatically. I wrote smd_ipn for that. When you get a notification from PayPal, the plugin wakes up and does your bidding. In this case it could grab details of the transaction (such as the customer email address), create a token just for them to access some facet of your site and have it mail it out automatically.
It really depends on the level of automation you wish to employ based on how much traffic you think you’ll get.
For an ultra low-key solution, btw, you can use Textpattern’s built-in <txp:password_protect> tag.
Be warned though, with any such method outlined above, there’s nothing to stop anyone sharing the content outside of your site directly or republishing it, so bear that in mind vs the cost and hassle of setting it all up. Choose your solution to suit.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Premium contents behind paywall
Thanks for your extensive explanation. I am neither a developer nor a particularly tech-savvy guy so I guess I will go the simpler way: Stripe button on the website and a task (set up in Zapier or Integromat) to automatically send, upon payment, a link to the access-protected section of my site that contains all the premium episodes and the corresponding rss feed. Thanks also for the final warning, I am well aware of it.
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Re: Premium contents behind paywall
Is smd_ipn still around somewhere? In case, is it possible to get the latest version available? Thanks.
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Re: Premium contents behind paywall
It is but it needs an overhaul since PayPal are onto V3 of their API. I have begun work on a sort of modular shop plugin that’s a bit like yab_shop with plugin modules for various third party providers but it needs unlimited custom fields to do it justice so I put it on ice for now.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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