Creating Pages for Membership Area

Site URL: http://www.PeoriaMusicLive.com

Hi! I run a site that promotes live local music in my area and am exploring the addition of a member area that includes local music news and some other exclusive things for subscribers.  I'm having a hard time visualizing how this all works and haven't been able to find many examples.

Can anyone point me in the direction of some good tutorials on this?

Also, one specific question right now... If I post a news story behind the pay wall, will the preview still be available publicly? (That's really important to getting my idea to work.)

Thank you!

1 hour ago, kindallreuschel said:

I am exploring the addition of a member area that includes local music news and some other exclusive things for subscribers.  I'm having a hard time visualizing how this all works.

Also, one specific question right now... If I post a news story behind the paywall, will the preview still be available publicly?

Member Area pages are the same as other pages, except they are protected from public access by a user's password. 

Regarding your specific question, if a blog page is placed in a Member Area, the posts will not be public. This includes all information, including titles and excerpts.

To make titles and excerpts public, you'd need to create and maintain two blog pages. One that you want the public to view and one that you want to contain the details for members. 

  If this post has helped you, please click a 'Like' or 'Thanks' icon below  ⬇️

4 hours ago, paul2009 said:

To make titles and excerpts public, you'd need to create and maintain two blog pages. One that you want the public to view and one that you want to contain the details for members. 

  If this post has helped you, please click a 'Like' or 'Thanks' icon below  ⬇️

Oh shoot. That's super disappointing. I had a "Squarespace Expert" quote me 30 hours of work to do it and I thought I figured it out in 30 minutes.

I don't understand how two blog pages would work. I guess I could just put up the photo and description and link the article separately in the caption on a separate page, and switch those out with every new post, but that's a lot of work.

11 minutes ago, kindallreuschel said:

I don't understand how two blog pages would work.

Typically, you create a post on the public "Blog collection". It will contain a thumbnail, title and enough copy to attract visitors and to entice them to follow the link and read.

Within the post you'll have the short intro and a read more link that takes them to the protected post that contains the full article. This other blog post will be on the Member Area protected "Blog collection" and, if the visitor is not a member, they'll see the 'not authorised' page encouraging them to join.

On 10/26/2021 at 1:37 PM, paul2009 said:

Typically, you create a post on the public "Blog collection". It will contain a thumbnail, title and enough copy to attract visitors and to entice them to follow the link and read.

Within the post you'll have the short intro and a read more link that takes them to the protected post that contains the full article. This other blog post will be on the Member Area protected "Blog collection" and, if the visitor is not a member, they'll see the 'not authorised' page encouraging them to join.

Thanks! I decided to go ahead and make the Members Area live so I could see what I could figure out, and the previews from the Members Only pages are still available. So Yay! 

See www.peoriamusiclive.com/news

The "More Music Stuff" is in the members only area and if you click it you get the access denied page. Huge relief here! 

Thanks for your help!