It's like metafilter but REALLY EXPENSIVE. And its only for cars.

February 2, 2012 2:30 PM

Pay to post in WordPress? Is this doable?

I've been tasked with figuring out a way to set up a website for a client where users would have to pay to post and I think I might have gotten in over my head.

Basically, they want a site where users can pay to have an item listed for a set amount of time. After the time is up the listing expires and the post goes away.

I'd like to do this in wordpress/php because that is what I'm most familiar with, so if you are suggesting a better way to go about it keep in mind that I'd probably have to learn it first. So far I'm thinking about using the Gravity Forms plugin to allow users to sign up and post something. It looks like it allows paypal payments to be set up as a requirement to post but I don't know how well that works. Once the post is up it seems like an easy matter to have one of the many post expiry plugins take care of the deleting after a set amount of time. Does this seem feasible or can you think of a better way to do it?

posted by cirrostratus to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

You want to look into the concept of roles. You can designate a user as having a role that allows commenting, another user as having a role that allows posting new entries, that sort of thing. And there are a number of plugins that give you more extensive control over roles.

Now, hooking up roles to payment status is another question. If I was only expecting a handful of registrations per day, I'd probably just do that manually, although you could probably pay someone to code up a plugin that would at least partially automate the process.
posted by adamrice at 2:52 PM on February 2, 2012

Run your registrations with Gravity Forms and it's PayPal plugin, and yeah, roles.
posted by DarlingBri at 5:34 PM on February 2, 2012