"data-members-plan" with multiple plans

Developer help
1

Hi everyone,

I updated a couple of Ghost installs I use to 4.5.0. Multiple plans is a super welcome addition – and in my case, I’ll launch a paid newsletter next week I wanted to use multiple tiers with, so the timing is absolutely perfect!

I have my own custom theme, and I want to code the multiple plans checkout myself (aka, not rely on Portal, not because I don’t like Portal but because it’s not localized). So far, I was using this piece of code in my theme for the checkout buttons/links (as explained here in the docs):

<a href="javascript:" data-members-plan="Monthly">Monthly plan</a>

I was wondering what I should put in data-members-plan now that I have set several different monthly plans? I tried to use both the plan ID (as shown in data-portal="signup/whateverstring", I used whateverstring) or the plan name, but none of these are working.

Thanks!

2

Based on this topic, data-members-plan is apparently driven by stripe_plans in the settings table. After I had a look at my dev Ghost install database, there is a proper stripe_prices table with all the correct tiers, but the stripe_plans entry in settings has not been updated. Is it reasonable to conclude that because stripe_plans has not been updated to reflect the new tiers, data-members-plan does not work with multiple tiers?

What is bizarre though is 1) data-members-plan="Monthly" still works but 2) does not load the plan sets in stripe_plans in the Stripe checkout page, but the cheapest monthly plan. Same with data-members-plan="Yearly": still works but also load the cheapest yearly plan instead of the one sets in stripe_plans.

3

The 4.5.0 release (and features in it) weren’t quite ready for prime-time and have been deprecated. 4.6.0 will be released soon which will contain some new UI, and not all of the new multi-tier features yet. There are still quite a lot of edges that haven’t been properly covered. Sorry for the confusion / inconvenience

5

I’m sorry John but are you telling me less than 24 hours before the launch of the paid version I’ve been teasing my community with for weeks that major features I’ve built my theme upon last week and that are now core of said launch have been… deprecated?!

Because if this is what you are indeed telling me, this is not “confusion” or “inconvenience”. This is a major breach of trust. Unless I am mistaken, these features were not advertised as “beta”, hence why I assumed they were production ready and built upon.

6

Yes, I am. And 4.5.0 has not been available for weeks. It was available for 3 days, before being deprecated.

If you have an issue with that, feel free to get involved and contribute to the open source software which you are relying on. That’s how that works.

7

I follow the GitHub releases RSS feed, the Ghost blog, the Ghost Twitter account, your Twitter account (both in my RSS reader so I can see all the tweets that are published regardless of Twitter’s algorithm), I’m a paid Rediverge subscriber, I’m regularly on the forum but I had no idea these features were being deprecated. And I’m sorry but based on this page, and for what I understand, deprecations are announced from one major version to the next one. Deprecating 4.5.0 with 4.6.0 when 4.5.0 features were not labelled as beta or in the labs completely contradicts this rule, as a 4.*- version is not a major version.

Say what you want, but this is really bad communication from the Ghost team – and I don’t see how lecturing me on open source software is addressing any of this.

For the record, I’m not knowledgeable enough in Ghost’s underlying technologies to contribute myself to Ghost, but I had plans to contribute financially via a GitHub sponsoring as soon as my newsletter had enough revenue. I also had plans to migrate my main self-hosted Ghost instance to your cloud service, mostly as a way to financially support the team and the product. And you know based on our previous interactions here (reread some of the personal messages we exchanged in the past) that I do care about Ghost, the product and its community. I’ve literally spent hundred of hours building a custom theme, and consciously decided to invest in Ghost, its product and its community as a core component of my developing content creation business while being extremely aware of Ghost’s development nature. I even started to write newsletter posts drafts where I was promoting Ghost!

So I would politely suggest that you stop using this condescending tone with me. And also that, for the second time, you stop to call me Simon when it is not my name.

I get that Ghost is a small team, has limited resources, is doing open source software and that bugs are inherently part of software development. But this is not a feature that was promised and never arrived, or was canceled. This is not a feature that was removed based on the guideline Ghost itself sets for deprecation. And I don’t see how directly contributing myself to Ghost’s code would have changed any of that.

I’m not here requiring you to add this niche feature I really need, or to develop that super complicated feature I (and only I) really want. I’m just pissed because your lack of communication and your rush to ship features put me in a very difficult position 24h before a major launch that went extremely smoothly so far.

I have planned this launch for months, I spent a ton of time building a custom theme, everything has been tested and is battle ready, my (fast growing) community of hundreds of engaged subscribers is waiting for this paid version. And now this. And honestly, the tone of your last answer does not help. At all.

Can you at least give me some details about what is being deprecated, and how it will be replaced? So that I can make the best decision for the future of my newsletter – and my business. Because this is literally what I am trying to build with Ghost as the fundamental layer of it. Thanks.

8

Hi Olivier, you seem to be extremely defensive and hostile about the idea that anyone could make any mistake that inconveniences you. I’m sorry you are unhappy that a piece of software had a bug that got rolled back, or that your username looks like “simon” and I used it incorrectly — perhaps you would consider allowing some room for the possibility that mistakes happen and it isn’t all some targeted/organised campaign that’s all about you.

There are many features and bugs we communicate carefully about based on their severity - and this isn’t remotely one of them. We rolled out something we were working on too soon, so we deprecated the release to correct the mistake. The release in question was never rolled out to anyone on our managed hosting (which you don’t use or pay for) and was never shared with any marketing.

If you, as a developer, choose to manually update to point releases immediately after they happen - that’s fine - but that’s entirely your decision to do things that way. I can also tell you right now if you continue to do that with the expectations you have now - you will continue to be disappointed - because they aren’t realistic.

Contrary to your claims, you are being demanding about a niche feature, and in fact that feature is super complicated. Otherwise we wouldn’t need more time to work on it. I’m not sure why you feel you have the authority to comment on what is and is-not easy to build, when you’ve just said you don’t have the technical ability to build it.

We’ve been working on multiple product support for a couple of months. The work is not complete, and we have no plans or estimate for when it will be. We will work on it until it’s done. The code for testing it accidentally went out in 4.5.0 was a simple error and nothing more.

I suggest you roll back to 4.4 and wait for the 4.6 release - which will be functionally identical to 4.4, and there is no other impact to how anyone at all uses Ghost.

I certainly did not lecture you in my last reply, but if you want to continue to use the Ghost forum then I suggest you have a very careful read of this. Consider it a lecture.