I’m building a paywall plugin for Wordpress. I’d like to give users as granular access as possible in controlling whether or not posts are “locked” (behind the paywall) or not.
I’m thinking about using “repeater” type of interface to let the user configure as many ‘rules’ as they see fit. Each rule will define a set of criteria that will unlock the post for the user trying to access it. If any of the rules evaluate to true, then the post will be ‘unlocked’ and the user will be able to access it.
For example, if a user creates rules like “If current user is Logged In” and “If post is in the category of “News”” then any user that is logged in will be able to access the the post, and any user (logged in or not) could access any post in the Category of “News”.
I’d also let the user choose to ‘lock’ the posts by default or ‘unlock’ them by default. If they choose to ‘unlock’ them by default, then the rules would work the same way, but in reverse.
This makes sense to my brain, but there’s a non-zero chance I am looking something, lol.
What if I only want to lock some posts? It’s common practice that shorter posts are free, while longer posts with more background are paid. Might be nice to offer the option locked/unlocked per post.
Also, I would think about something more specific than just be logged in, like paid subscription and the like, how would you handle those?
Also, there are also metered paywalls, where you can read N articles for free before it starts locking. Might be beyond your scope for now, but just saying they exist.
Sorry, I didn’t mention it in the OP, but there’s a metered feature that allows the user to specify a certain number of posts that can be viewed for ‘free’, and the amount of time that must pass before they get another set of ‘free’ posts.