Geeklog Forums

A few questions...

Is it possible to set up geeklog to function like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal sites where content is password protected unless one is a paid subscriber? (Some content would be free, other paid.)

Second, how flexible is the archiving/category option? Like, if I have a general topic of Europe, sub categories of various countries, then sub categories of dates... Can I search something as specific as content posted to a French catogry between March and April of 2004?

I'm considering movabletype, but recognize that geeklog is better equiped for handling large groups/users.

All for now!

I'm not aware of a plugin for geeklog that would handle your paid subscriptions, however, assuming that you do come up with a way to track who's paid and who has not, I have a couple suggestions.

First, you can set the variable $_CONF['loginrequired'] = 1; in your config.php file under the Misc. Settings section. It will require your users to log in before they can post anything.

When you are posting stories on your site, don't mark the "Anonymous" checkbox at the bottom of the story submission page. This way, one must login to see the storie(s), and/or to post any of their own content or comments.

On my family web site, I have a single story that is set as anonymous that people will see if they happen by, and that's all they can see. Once they log in though, they have access to all stories and other features of the web site.

As far as your searching question goes, have a look at the advanced search link. You can specify a date range in there, as well as search specfic content areas of your GL site.

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~Brian

Hi there. Thanks for the reply. I'm digesting it (and a chocolate ice cream cone) right now.

My issue is finding a CMS that handles thousands of users. With a few exceptions (the set up of a couple of blogs/journals), users would not be contributing content outside of commenting. They'd only be reading articles. It's for an online news site, you see.

So the current CMS (Campsite?) is rather...restrictive. And not very user friendly. And the help forums aren't anywhere near as active as say, geeklog or movable type.

So far, geeklog seems best equiped for handling large groups of users and is flexible with archiving and searches. But the tracking paid and expired subscriptions part is a big part of my research. That part has to be automated.

I welcome more replies to the post!

Brian has pretty much summarized Geeklog's features already.

Just a minor addition: You can assign pretty much any object in Geeklog (stories, events, blocks, ...) to a user group. You could, for example, write stories that are only visible for paying users while registered (but non-paying) users get to see other stories. The permission system is pretty flexible there.

As for the actual payment processing - that would require some custom code. There are a few Geeklog sites (that I know of) out there that offer content to paying users only, but AFAIK they all use their own custom implementation.

I've briefly looked into the code that PayPal provides, for example, and it shouldn't be too hard to create something out of this.

bye, Dirk

Is there a setting in submit.php to uncheck the anonymous read box instead of having it selected by default?

Kinda answered my own question.

This thread was helpful.

I am still curious where you'd set the permissions to only allow registered users to see stories. You can change whether they submit stories with $_CONF['submitloginrequired'] = 1, of course. Still allows them to see the story block, yes?

Nearly every object in Geeklog has permissions that you can set - that includes the story block ...

With the permission settings and the config options, it's possible to close a site such that anonymous users only see the login form and nothing else (or maybe only a story / static page explaining what the site is about and why they should register).

bye, Dirk

I host on psek (great service by the way) and I came across phpcoin" a free software package originally designed for web-hosting resellers to handle clients, orders, invoices, notes and helpdesk, but no longer limited to hosting resellers. " This may be useful to manage the subscriptions for your paid content. I'd be interested if anyone knew much about phpcoin and if it has been integrated with geeklog.

Best Regards, Bob