Membership tiers?

[badrihippo]

@nolan

1. I understand we can get back an array of subscriptions, but I don’t know enough about Handlebars to know if this is enough to let us gate content. Say for instance we have three plans–tier1, tier2, and tier3. I’d want to do something like (pseudocode):

{{#if @member.subscriptionPlans.contains("tier1") }}

I don’t know if Handlebars lets us use even that much logic, but as of now we’d have to iterate through the subscriptions, collect the plan names, and check inclusion against that list. Unless I’m missing something, that’s a lot of logic to pack into themes, and we’d need that even if we did find a platform that managed memberships through Stripe.

Ghost’s themes don’t natively support that much logic, but the underlying Handlebars engine does. According to this blog post, one can write a custom helper (in this case, to check the @member.subscriptionPlans.contains('tier1') you mentioned). However, you’d have to go right into the Ghost source-code, and manually replace it every time Ghost is updated.

https://whitfin.io/adding-custom-ghost-handlebars-helpers/

You can probably write a script to insert it automatically each time, but either way this option will only be available to self-hosted users.

Those caveats aside, this setup seems quite promising. We could even replace the subscriptions page with custom code, ignoring the tier settings and hard-coding Stripe values directly, which would make for a more seamless experience (at least as far as the user is concerned—little will they know what’s going on behind the scenes! )