Protecting your content - YourMembers/yourmembers GitHub Wiki

Content protection is Your Members' most important feature. It's the one thing that prevents people from accessing the content they shouldn't be accessing. In short, it keeps your exclusive content...well, exclusive.

To use it, however, you need to know a bit about this terminology and think about how you're going to use this powerful feature on your site to create and mould your business. To do that, you need a bit of information. Most importantly, the difference between a "package account type", a "package" and an "individual purchase"

The package account type defines what content users in that type can see and not see. When using Your Members for membership management, each person is assigned a package account type. Some package account types are already set up for you:

Guest -- For people who visit your site, but are not logged in.

Free -- Only available if the free module is active, the Free package account type includes all those who are registered, but currently don't have access to premium (or higher levels of) content.

Member -- This is a user-defined level created to show you what additional package account types could look like. For example, this package account type could include only users who have purchased access. You can delete this one, if you'd like.

Feel free to add more package account types and customise everything to meet your needs and make your membership site work best for you. Here are a few ideas:

• Gold, Silver and Bronze packages
• Premium and Basic packages
• Package account types divided by category or content type

It doesn't matter how creative you get with the package account type names or what you end up calling them. The names simply help you and your users tell the package account types apart from each other, so don't worry. Have some fun with them and make sure they work for you.

Just one thing to keep in mind:

Package account types aren't arranged on a hierarchy! This means that, just because those with a 'free' membership can see certain content, doesn't mean "member" level users can see it. If you want both membership types to see something, you need to specifically mark it that way. However, this is great if you want to create content specifically for the purpose of getting 'free' members to join up and start handing over some cash.

A package is the payment plan associated with a user and a package type. So, when a user signs up, he or she chooses a package to subscribe to (the package becomes a subscription). Then, that user is assigned a package account type appropriate for that package.

Each package can only relate to one package account type and have only one duration. But, a package account type can have a number of packages associated with it. Confused? Here's an example:

• A user can subscribe to a package of $5 a month for a "member" package account type.
• Another user can subscribe to the $1000 ever 10 years package for a "member" package account type.
• A third user can choose a package of $4 every two months for a "member" package account type.

All three of these can exist at the same time, on the same type. Just make sure your math is right -- Your Members does NOT error check costs or the duration. It assumes that the human in charge can count, so make sure to double-check these.

All of the content you publish can be sold individually, in addition to selling them as part of a subscription or package account type. This means, if a user only wants to see one video or post, they can buy access to it at a price you choose (provided you checked this option when you published).

You can also group your content together into bundles, and offer each bundle up for sale at a specific price. And while the price may be determined by the package account type the content falls into, users can still buy an unlimited number of individual posts or content bundles (packs of posts).