Creators, reply to this thread with all sorts of ideas that the different Wordpress developers in the community might be interested in implementing.
Developers, feel free to run with any of these, engage, ask more questions, and see which of these work for your projects.
We’ll keep it all in one thread so it’s easier to see each other’s thoughts in one place and “upvote” one another with the likes feature.
Patreon’s Wordpress Philosophy: “Leave Room”
Our intention with the free, basic Patreon Wordpress Plugin is in fact to keep it a very basic plugin, to leave room for developers to extendbecause of the wide diversity of creators and WordPress usage out there.
Our vision is that the core free plugin is what everyone can install, and then pick and choose additional plugins that build off of that in the same Wordpress installation. We’ll be working on some guides on how to do this as well.
One successful example of this is https://www.patreon.com/apps/patronpluginpro by @codebard (who also is helping build and maintain the free plugin) that I highly recommend trying - it’s a paid/advanced plugin that works very well together with our core free plugin and adds a lot of the features some creators have asked for.
I hope that helps understand our vision for the core free plugin and how to make it most useful to the wide variety of content and membership businesses on Patreon.
I just set up the Patreon wordpress plugin and it looks like you are off to a great start! Thank you for setting up this community provide feedback, bugs, feature requests etc.
Here are a few quick thoughts on what I’d like to see next:
Ability to extend oauth access to protect pages in addition to posts.
Ability to designate a category to automatically protect all posts within that category.
Ability to select Patreon award levels instead of a dollar amounts for protected content.
Shortcode to restrict just a section of a post, replace with custom code. (So a Patron will see the whole post and a non-Patron will see something else instead of that section - presumably “Join please” language.)
One feature I’d love to see would be the ability to set Wordpress user roles based on Patreon award levels. Eg. $5 pledge grants Contributor role in Wordpress.
@Lyon that’s so interesting - can you tell us more about how that would work? I’d be fascinated to hear more context around the kind of community and membership you’re doing. I love how patrons would not just have more content but actively be collaborating with you.
In my case I have an external app that connects to my WP site and allows users to do more based on whether they have the Contributor role or not. It doesn’t affect content on the WP site directly other than updating a database, however I could see this being used in the way you describe.
Really, all I need is a user meta field specifying whether they are a Patron or not. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the contributor field.
In the current plugin, there isnt. In the Pro plugin, there are different locking mechanisms like locking or showing posts after X days, but currently there isnt a trial option in that plugin either.
If you can write code, it could be possible to put in a check to see for how long a user had been registered on your site, and then bypass or enforce protection via the filters included in the official plugin.
Great question. Patreon doesn’t yet have free-trial functionality, and we definitely hear that request a lot. As @codebard said it would have to be something that you power through the Wordpress layer itself.
That’s a really interesting thought, if the WordPress plugin can help solve this problem initially and test the solution, before it makes it into core Patreon.
Awesome, thanks! I’m still learning how Patreon members are viewed by wordpress through the plugin, whether they are official WP members or if it skips the default membership system all together. If I made the free trial occur through a free wordpress membership, and then patreon was required for deeper engagement, that could work too. Just dont want people to have to sign up for multiple accounts so ideally they could do a seamless upgrade through the wordpress site or something like that
Every user logging in via Patreon gets a WP user account created for him/her. That’s a totally normal account with subscriber level.
If a user had a WP account before, and s/he was logged into that account before logging in with Patreon the first time, then that WP account gets linked to that Patreon account.
one feature that would be useful is the ability to name different patron levels, and lock/unlock content by those names. for instance i might have two different $5 tiers, but i can’t give each tier access to different content. if i could name them “five-dollar-tier-1” and “five-dollar-tier-2”, then i could unlock some content for tier-1 and unlock other content for tier-2.
That’s really interesting @eyeteeth! I’d love to hear more - how does that look in practice - what kind of content in your specific case would you split (if it’s on your creator page feel free to link and tell me where to look)
i don’t have a use for it personally, i just thought of it while i was making a function to get patreon level from post meta, i noticed you can only get (and set) the pledge amount. maybe good to give each tier you create an id, so when you call it, it returns an array with pledge amount, name, description, pledge image, etc? useful for a lot of cases, for instance if you change the cost of a pledge level you don’t have to go through your whole site and change the pledge amount of every post with the old amount.
another possibility that occurs to me, would it be possible to track # of billing cycles at current pledge level? for instance, one possible solution to the “ghost patrons” problem is to gate some content until the patron has been at the current level for at least one billing cycle.
Has there been more thinking on this? I have free content and patron-only content, and two things I would love to be able to do is to:
Exempt a given person from the patreon requirement site-wide, giving them full read access to all content, patreon-protected or not. Think friends or business partners, etc…
Also, when a person contacts me with information or something I find valuable, I’d love to give them a month free or something like that as a tangible reward.
You could solve both of these use cases (and others) by implementing a coupon function, that allows you to create a coupon code and set the duration of that code to an arbitrary number of days or non-expiring. Then the plugin, first checks for coupon code, then patreon level and lets the person through if either condition is correct…
I’d love to see this as a new feature, and would be happy to pay for the premium plugin if it included this capability
Being able to automatically grant roles when a user signs into your site via Patreon would be amazing. My commenting system uses the roles as a label, and I like having Patrons get a special label. Not having to keep track manually of who’s a Patron and who isn’t would be a miracle.
To illustrate more of what @eyeteeth said, I have two $100 tiers. One gets a better cameo in my comic, the other gets a character design. I would really like it if the Cameo $100 tiers could not access the character design form, for example.
I’d like to see widgets included with the plugin. A couple I have in mind:
Goal trackers
Official Patreon button
I know the Patreon button code can be copied and pasted into the Custom HTML widget… but not everyone wants to deal with finding the code for the button and then figuring out that they’ve gotta put it inside a Custom HTML widget. It’s easier to have it integrated into the plugin, plus you can add options for it such as alignment (which currently is a pain to deal with because I’ve no idea how to centre the button using HTML/CSS).