Moving from Tumblr to Self-Hosted Wordpress Pt. II
Since the move from Tumblr and my new blogging aspirations meant to deal more with WordPress, I have a few more things to share.
My goal was
- Serve public and private posts in the same stream
- Hide Private posts in the listing, but if you hit the private post directly (via rss, notification), show a message to register/login.
- New registrations have to be approved
- Spam Registration/Login Protection
- Subscribers should be notified by mail when a new post happened
- Free extensions
1. Membership Extensions
I first thought I should use Wordpress Jetpack Subscriber because it came with the whole "content protection, registration, and login as well as notification" jazz. But I figured, for a semi private blog I didn't want to ditch tumblr just to be depended on Wordpress servers (same thing, I know).
What speaks for the Jetpack solution, it just works out of the box and looks good. No unstyled forms and elements, no short codes, everything is wired up correctly.
Other membership plugins offer similar things, but often stick out like a sore thumb if you don't get the CSS right. Or the templating is weird.
Anyway, I ditched Jetpack because the subscribers have to go through Wordpress.com, a hard to sell and ahgain, Wordpress is going to change their service if they want and suddenly it's paid only.
For a work project, I used Ultimate Member before, but in order to learn something new, I tried out Simple Membership.
Both offer protected content, login and registration, user management and some paid content stuff (usually in their PRO offering).
Simple Membership did what I wanted in the free version, but I ended up debugging their code, just to find out the registration form can't be overwritten in a child-theme. Odd inconsistency, but it looked like they were improving this old code.
Anyway I wasn't happy and went back to Ultimate Member, since their forms look decent by default and are easier to modify (form builder is included).
The whole admin UI is also a bit nicer and easier to follow.
How to protect several posts without going into each post?
The trick is to create a WordPress category “Private” for example and protect this category. This is the way it works in both plugins. This way, I was able to add posts to the “private” category in bulk!
2. Notifications about new posts
Notification Master is offering that. It works fine for email.
3. Filter out protected posts from listing
Advanced Query Loop extends the WP Query Loop component and offers more ways to filter content.
Conclusion
I have to say, I was a WP hater in the past, but despite some annoying things (WP drama 2024, the constant upselling of extensions etc.) I really like it to quickly set up a complex webapp/website that you can't come up with, with Kirby or Statamic or Craft CMS (who like to take some of WP's share). If the out-of-the-box stuff is good enough, go for it. Damn, even the native template builder is pretty good, once I understood it. So, not the old PHP blog anymore, yet all there is needed is a simple shared PHP 8.x.
