After recently building an eLearning site and delving into the mechanics of Learning Management Systems (LMS), I realised that you don’t actually need to shell out the best part of $200 per year for a bloated over-hyped content paywall.
It is not so much that I didn’t like the LMS system that I chose. It does the job really well and the support team has been excellent the few times and decided to utilize it.
The thing that I really don’t like is the sheer amount of bloat they add to the site, especially when combining the LMS with WooCommerce.
It feels disorganised. Menus here, features there, 637 things I don’t even need.
However building an eLearning site with a commercially available LMS that is bloated with features has taught me one very important thing. It taught me what I actually need to sell content online.
What I wanted was a simple content paywall that would integrate seamlessly into WooCommerce, without the annual subscription and without a ton of features that I don’t even need.
I also don’t want “Lite version” and semi-free plugins nagging me to upgrade to the bloatware £79 annual subscription version, cluttering my WordPress dashboard with bright green “upgrade to Premium” buttons.
So I decided to build my own plugin… Article Pass.
Article Pass is a simple and extremely lightweight plugin that I designed simply to give me the functionality I need on my own digital products store.
I was so impressed with the end result (with a little help from ChatGPT), that I decided I wanted to release the plugin.
A simple, lightweight and completely free content paywall. My gift to the community!
If you are reading this then you are super-early! This page serves as a placeholder for the up-and-coming project. The code is not quite ready yet but if you want to give it a test drive, contact me here: [email protected]
