Hi. I am new to Webflow (and web development in general). I’m trying to build a literary magazine of sorts. Rather than limit users to a certain number of articles, I was wondering if I could limit them to certain word count limits. Ex: free account users get full readership access to all micro-memoirs 500 words or less. And then paid members get access to long-form content.
Is this possible?
hi @eilly these paywall are waste of time as they can be easily breached and as you have mentioned you have no developer background it may be a challenging for you to make it right. My suggestion will be start looking for any lib or services that will be able to provide this service for you but it will be most probably additional monthly cost and results can be …
hi @eilly I have created for you some starting point. limitation is based on paragraphs instead f words that will be much easier for you to implement. when you change value of isPaidUser to false it will show only first 2 paragraphs.
But like with everything in code there are many ways to achieve identical results.
hope this will point you right direction
Stan always knocks these out awesomely, but as he pointed out there isn’t a way to protect your content using client-side script.
If you need it to be protected, it’s possible to leverage Webflow User Accounts and use access groups to paywall content with a reverse proxy, so that only the first N words are in the page. Add a nice fade out effect and you get a nice professional teaser solution with a CTA to purchase a membership subscription.
Thank you! Can you help me understand the security risks a bit more? Is it the user info and payment info that can be exposed? Or is it the content library (the literary submissions) themselves? Or both? I’ve read about using an external database, but I’m unclear how that is more secure.
Hi Eileen, I was referring to your paywall content.
Typically a paywall refers to a UX where public users & search engines see a preview of content, but users must pay & login in order to see the full content.
Webflow doesn’t offer much in the way of “partial gating”. You can gate a single element so that is is only visible to logged in users, but you cannot gate it by access group, which means you can’t effectively build a collection page that shows the full article to paid users, and a “preview” to the public and for SEO purposes.
There are some very messy hacks you can do to build limited versions of this, like double collections + some hacky javascript… but a paywalls built that way usually be breached easily.