Preview of the upcoming Drip Content add-on
Today we’re happy to share a preview of the upcoming Drip Content add-on for Restrict Content Pro. Over the last couple of months we’ve been working on Restrict Content Pro version 2.6, which contains some architectural enhancements that not only improve the performance of RCP, but are also a prerequisite for introducing our new Drip Content add-on. If all goes well with beta testing, RCP 2.6 and Drip Content will both be available within two weeks.
Today we’re going to show you a preview!
Update: Drip Content is now available!
What is Drip Content?
Drip Content refers to the schedule for when content will become available to a member. Without drip, content becomes available the day a member signs up. With drip, you can define a schedule so that the content becomes available when you want.
Let’s look at a practical example. Let’s say you write tutorials that teach people how to play the guitar. Your lessons normally take 3 months to complete. Without drip, your members could sign up, download all the content, and cancel their subscription the next day. With drip, you can release each lesson on the schedule you want and retain your members for the full 3 months.
Drip Content is a great way to retain members and increase your revenue.
Let’s talk about the workflow for defining drip schedules. When Drip Content launches, it will support two types of drip schedules – Content Type and Taxonomy. Let’s look at what each of those mean.
Content Type
The Content Type drip setting allows you to drip specified posts, pages, and other custom content types based on someone’s membership level. This drip type can be defined in two places – at the post edit screen during content creation, or at the subscription level edit screen under Restrict > Subscription Levels. Let’s have a look at each.
Define as many or few drip schedules as you like. Defining your drip schedules in the subscription level management area allows you to easily define all your post-level drip settings without having to edit each post, page, and custom content type that you want to drip. And if you want to drip entire categories of posts, you can do that using the Taxonomy drip type, which we’ll look at below.
But first, let’s look at how you can define Content Type schedules on the post edit screen.
Again, define as many or few schedules as you like. Defining your schedules here is handy for managing your content scheduling during the content creation process. There’s no need to jump over to the subscription level management area and define the schedules there. Do it all while you’re creating the content, right on the same screen. Any schedules you define here will automatically show up in the appropriate subscription level management screens.
Now let’s take a look at those taxonomy types I mentioned above.
Taxonomy Type
If you’re not familiar with the word taxonomy, it’s just a fancy word for categories, tags, or any other custom grouping “things” you have for classifying content as related to each other in some fashion. WordPress comes with Categories and Tags built it, which are accessible under the Posts menu in your WordPress dashboard. Drip Content for Restrict Content Pro supports both of these. Moreover, some plugins – like Easy Digital Downloads, for example – add custom taxonomies for product categories and product tags. Drip Content for Restrict Content Pro supports these as well.
Defining a drip schedule for a taxonomy lets you control the schedule for many pieces of content at once, without having to edit each piece of content to define the schedule. Let’s look at how that works.
Taxonomy schedules are defined at the subscription level edit screen. Here’s a look at that.
Using the taxonomy drip type, you can quickly define a schedule for a group of posts, pages, products, and other custom content types without the hassle of editing each individual piece of content and defining it there. A schedule management interface will be added to the taxonomy term edit screens in a future version so you can more easily define taxonomy schedules for multiple memberships all in one place.
And yes, if you’re wondering, you can use both Content Type and Taxonomy drip schedules at the same time.
Displaying Member Content
One of the features that we’ve seen requested the most is the ability to show a member the drip content that comes with his or her subscription. We’ve added a shortcode for that to make it easy for you to show a list of posts and taxonomies that are available to the member that have a drip schedule defined. It also has the option of showing a list of things that are not yet available, along with the date they will become available to the member. This is optional and can be disabled if you like. Let’s look at a screenshot of how those look.
That’s a look at the upcoming Drip Content add-on for Restrict Content Pro. We’ll be adding a few other goodies in the near future. Drip Content will be available to all active Professional and Ultimate license holders. Don’t have a Professional or Ultimate license yet? Get one today! If you have the Personal or Plus license, upgrade from your account dashboard and pay only the difference!