RoleScoper

I’m having a lot of fun playing with a plugin called RoleScoper. This is pretty cool — it allows you to create your own WordPress roles and exercise fine-grained control over what users can do. It allows you to restrict content, for example.

How might this affect webcomics creators? Well, let’s say you want to sell memberships on your site — only members who pay you money get to see certain strips. Take Joyce & Walky for example — the general public gets to see only the Saturday strips, whereas paying members get strips all week.

ComicPress has some support for this idea — you can tag a user as a Member and add content in your blog posts that only members can see. My idea was to see what plugins already exist that can manage user roles, and RoleScoper seems to be the best.

Think about a situation beyond just paid/unpaid. Say you want to sell three levels of service — silver, gold, and platinum for example. Silver members get to see some strips, gold members get to see even more, and platinum members get to see ultra-special exclusive strips. OK, so maybe most webcomics creators don’t get that deeply into the marketing, but it would be nice to be able to do.

So I’m rewriting some of stripShow’s code to be more compatible with RoleScoper and other plugins. Version 2.5 will have full compatibility.