Geeklog Forums

My primary website publishes English language news, and I'm going to be switching to a subscription based model.

Right now (and for the past eight years) readers have been able to access all content for free, and advertisers paid the bills.

Now I'm going to be charging a $20 annual subscription fee.

I'm trying to decide on the best way to go about this.

There are currently about 19,000 articles already published on the website. For SEO reasons I'm going to leave all of that content open to the public as historical or archive.

And this is what I want to be able to accomplish;

As of 1 December 2012, the full text of new articles will be available only to people who have previously subscribed (via PayPal) and who are logged in to the website as "users" or "members".

I want to know is it possible with the current standard configuration options to allow anyone (public, Google) to see the article Title and Introduction (only), and to reserve the Body for logged on Members?

Or, is there another or better way to go about this?

Don
www.panama-guide.com

A simple way could be to write the private article in a private topic then copy the article and set the topic to public topic with a link to the private article at the end of the intro and remove the body.

Also hide your public topic from logged-In users.

Ben

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I'm available to customise your themes or plugins for your Geeklog CMS

OK, that would work. What do you think about using a sort of "trickle down" approach? The idea being to take advantage of the new "child" topics in GL 2.x - meaning -

Let's say for a Topic or Category such as "Corruption" I could create a child Topic or Category such as "Expanded" or "Full Text." Then the article in the base "Corruption" category would contain the Title, one line of text, possibly the photo. Then under that, as a "child" Topic "Full Text" - would be the full body of the expanded article, accessible only to paid subscribers and logged on users.

It would be a lot more work, because I would have to basically create two articles for every article published on the website - and I have about 19,000 articles published in the past eight years. I now average between ten to fifteen articles per day, so every additional keystroke or mouse click is significant.

I would like to find a way within the existing structure to accomplish the same thing, but without this solution of basically having to post two articles every time.

Does anyone else have any suggestions? Dirk?

Don
www.panama-guide.com

Bens way might be the easy way.

Articles only have one set of permissions. To add more (like for the body) would be a lot of work. Besides the article.php page they can also be displayed through topics, searches, print, email and rss feeds (I might have missed one). All of this would have to be modified.

Probably the less destructive way to accomplish your goals would be to set the article permissions for read to your members group. You could then modify the topic display code to display all articles as anonymous (since it only displays the intros). If they click on read more for an article they then would be required to login.

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

We could also implement this feature in paypal plugin if someone want to sponsor it.

The feature will use a config setting to set the group with access to the private content and the admin will need to add 2 tags on either side of the private content in articles, static pages, blocks, plugin items...

Ben

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I'm available to customise your themes or plugins for your Geeklog CMS

OK, here's a question. I'm experimenting with the options. Ben's suggestion worked just fine - to basically publish two articles. The first can be viewed by the public, anonymous users, Google bots, etc. It contains only the Title, and first line of the article. Then there's an explanation, telling anonymous users that if they want to see more, they will have to subscribe. Logged on users don't see these types of articles.

Then a second article is published with the same title and the full text of the article. These can only be seen by members who are logged on.

It works, but it's more work, because I basically have to do two articles for every one published. I can create some shortcuts, but it's still going to get old.

Question: Is there any way to allow Google and the other bots and crawlers to have access to the articles that have been marked for logged in users only?

Don

If you want do so your article must be public for google robots and will be entirely available in google cache if you do not specify otherwise. Anyway any fake google robots could read your article.

Ben

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I'm available to customise your themes or plugins for your Geeklog CMS