Pay for "most" of specific posts

#1

I am trying to use s2member as a pay-for-post kind of solution.
But rather than hiding the entire post, I want to give readers (guests) the first paragraph for free.

Pay-for-post seems possible with Specific Post/Page “Buy Now” access.
Hiding parts of the post seems possible with shortcodes.

But I am having trouble linking those two functions together. I would appreciate any help!

  1. Specific Post/Page Buy Now appears designed for restricting access to the entire post… is this correct? The UI won’t let me generate shortcodes for pages that aren’t specifically protected based on the post_id.
  2. What permissions are actually granted to a user when they make a purchase using the Specific Post/Page Buy Now?
  3. What happens in the above scenario when the user is a guest? s2member doesn’t appear to automatically make an account for a guest if they make a purchase using the Specific Post/Page Buy Now. And it looks like anyone that has the shortURL that’s created can access the page, is this also correct?

Thank you!

#2

Hi zmcnulty.

The specific post/page restriction is to sell access to someone without requiring him to register or be logged in.

If you don’t mind making them signup and login, you would rather sell them the access with custom capabilities unique for each page you want to sell access to.

With the ccaps, you can easily hide content on the page using the conditionals, allowing you to show the page preview/teaser and a payment option to those that don’t have access to the rest of the page yet.

Does that help? :slight_smile:

#3

Thanks for your reply!
I am wondering if it’s possible to use the specific post/page restriction–so not requiring register/login. But not the entire page. Can ccaps be used in that scenario?

#4

I believe his is what you are looking for to protect ‘part’ of the content…

https://s2member.com/kb-article/s2if-simple-shortcode-conditionals/

“Sometimes it’s necessary to allow everyone to access to your content (e.g., everyone can land on a certain Post or Page and view it), but maybe you need to hide (protect) a certain part of that content. Or, maybe you need to display something different to non-members.”

#5

Thank you for your reply Debbie. I do indeed need to use shortcode conditionals, but I am wondering what sort of permissions I should test for in the above scenario (guests purchasing access to specific pages).

All of the examples on the page you linked are looking for membership levels, which isn’t applicable on the per-page purchase scenario.

Is ccaps the only way to do this? Are guests able to have ccaps, or must the users be registered?

#6

“ccaps” will not work for you unless you create a unique one for every document. What a pain and requires user to log in.

What is standard for your situation is creating a ‘buy’ page with your intro paragraph and buy now button (unprotected) – then a separate ''purchased" page (page level protection) with the full content.

That is pretty much all you can do if you are selling something but don’t want to require login membership.

#7

Understood, thanks for your quick reply again! I suppose from the UX side it wouldn’t be too horrible having a preview page and separate full article page. I’ll let the plugin handle the work of keeping the full article page out of SEO/RSS/social posts etc.

#8

Just to answer your last two questions…
#2 No Permissions are granted to the user. Only the link carries page permission.
#3 Yes, anyone with the link will have permission to view the page sold an long as it has not expired. I am unaware of any way to prevent that. Your best bet is to set an expiration date and just renew it if requested by a user. I use a 30 expiration (I don’t tell them that) because my users normally read or download the item and don’t need it ‘for life’.