I switched to a subscription model in November of last year (2012). Now paying subscribers have to be logged in to their accounts in order to see the full text of articles.

Articles published

I've been publishing "teaser" articles containing just the first sentence of the article. These "teasers" are visible only to anonymous users (the public who are not logged in to their user accounts). In the gl_stories database, these reflect a "0" under "perm_members" and a "2" under "perm_anon"

The full versions of the articles are published with the entire content, but marked as "read" for members (users who are signed in to their accounts). These are invisible to the general public. In the gl_stories database these articles reflect a "2" under "perm_members" and a "0" under "perm_anon".

Now, here's my question. I only want to keep the "teasers" active for about three or four weeks. After that time, I want to delete the "teaser" articles and change the permissions for the articles that were restricted to signed in users only, to public access.

I now have an accumulation of articles in this status. I know, I can go and change all of them manually, delete the teasers, and change the permission checks on all of the full articles. But, there are a lot of them (like more than 2,000).

So, would it be possible to do this through the database? Can I just pull up the articles and modify them at that level - like make a pull then change the appropriate elements under "perm_members" and "perm_anon" as required? If so, how do I do that? If I make this sort of manipulation at the database level, will I be screwing something else up?

I'm just trying to find a way to save some time, and to make this task easier. Thanks.

Don Winner
www.panama-guide.com