How subscription works in Ghost 3.0?

Memberships & subscriptions
1

Hi, I’m a completely new Ghost user. Therefore, my questions can be trivial but I want to have everything clear :)

  1. I installed Ghost 3.0 (free trial) because I wanted to see how “regwall” looks like (access to content only for registered users) and “paywall” (access to content only for subscribers).

  2. I have enabled “Enable members” in Labs menu and “Allow free member signup”.

  3. I added a new post with the “Members only” option

In this setting, articles are not visible to unlogged users at all. The Ghost demo (https://rediverge.com) shows a different logic: Part of the article is visible and below is the payment form.

I also don’t see the “sign in” / “log in” option in my example site.
There is only a “Subscribe” CTA, which is a link to the newsletter.

QUESTIONS:

  1. Does the new Ghost allow showing part of the content and the rest only for registered users?

  2. Does the new Ghost allow showing part of the content and the rest only for paying subscribers?

  3. Is it easy to add CTA / “Log in” link to my site?

  4. Do these options require code interference?

Thanks for your help!

2 Likes
2

I could be wrong here, but it sounds to me like the theme you’re using is Casper, which isn’t a members enabled theme. Ghost just released an open source theme that is set up for members, Lyra. You can read more about Lyra, as well as find a download link for it, on the Requirements docs page.

4 Likes
3

Thank you for your answer. This is a possible reason. Casper & Lyra look practically the same. From a user perspective I do not understand why Ghost advertises Members option but default theme (available after start free trial) does not support this.

I have 2 more questions:
1. Is the page template with “princing” available or I have to do it yourself? (after click on “subscribe” CTA) DONE
2. Can I determine how much content should be visible before regwall / paywall on specific page?
3. When I choose “Members only” or “Paid-members only” in the post settings, I always see the registration form.

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The demo https://rediverge.com shows that you can immediately show the payment form for non-logged users.

4

Hey!

  • You can control how much “teaser” content by utilising the excerpt. You can show the excerpt to non-logged in viewers, and the content instead of members
  • Forms won’t be hidden when switching post access options. It’s only the content that will be hidden

More information on post access within Members can be found here:

Just to clarify, Rediverge isn’t a “demo” but a real project that was built with a custom Ghost theme. All of Rediverge is possible in Ghost, but the theme it uses is completely customised.

5

Currently {{excerpt}} in members only post, in full post view ( post.hbs template ) only shows if there is any custom excerpt added in that post setting. If there is no custom excerpt then no excerpt being shown. And custom excerpt is limited to 300 characters length. That means you can show maximum 300 characters length of content to non member visitor for member-only post. Not more than that.

Also notice in https://rediverge.com/ each post showing small excerpt on top and then 2 paragraph of hard coded text in each post.

2 Likes
6

Sorry about the confusion all. This is actually a known limitation of the beta. We’ll feed this back to the team, thanks for the feedback :slightly_smiling_face:

7

Hey David, just curious from the perspective of SEO and Google in regards to the new member or paid member options on the articles.

As mentioned above (and as I saw in the docs), only an excerpt is shown to people unless they’re signed up or a paying member and there’s no way to ‘hack’ that so to speak. However, does this leave the content kind of blocked from ranking with Google?

I’m trying to think of my strategy overall in using these new member options, as that’s a big consideration and I can’t find any info on it.

8

Hey @artofbryce. Google will only be able to crawl the logged out content on a members only or paid-members only page. Member only content isn’t really designed to perform well in the search engines since it’s always behind a log in.

If you’d like to have content on your site that is intended to rank and drive organic traffic then you can use the public content post access level and optimise those pages and posts accordingly using the post settings menu in the editor.

Optionally, if you’d like to noindex your member only content you can do this with code injection or in your theme.

3 Likes
9

Hi, I had the same problem with my own theme. The solution was (in my case) to set the Ghost API version to “v3” in package.json of the theme, otherwise the {{#if access}} was always false:

"engines": {
    "ghost": ">=3.0.0",
    "ghost-api": "v3"
},

You will see that in the source code of the Lyra theme.