Thank you for your feedback.
I also consider user-friendlyness as very important and am always thankful for suggestions on this.
The user roles are indeed a bit tricky within WordPress itself. They are actually very artifical and developers can’t rely on them. What really matters are capabilities.
Let me know the capability a contributor must have and I provide you with the code to hide ads from them in the frontend.
Thanks
Thomas
I thought about the user role issue for (almost) the whole day and would like to ask you for more feedback on this.
In WordPress, a user role is just a group of capabilities and there is not really a hierarchy between roles. I.e., using your capability plugin you could give more capabilities to a subscriber than to the admin or completely redefine your new user role.
The setting I included to choose which role a user must have in order to see ads indeed only works with the default user roles, because they are bound to specific capabilities.
Now, I am thinking about how to make this more useful to advanced users like you. Would you prefer to choose the capability a user role (or user) must have in order to see ads? I.e., choosing “manage_options” instead of “Admin”?
Thank you for your ideas.
Thomas
The workaround I ended up with is I installed a role editor plugin and changed the “Contributor” role. I cloned the permissions of subscriber into the Contributor role then renamed it “Supporter”. I then pointed the Advanced Ads setting to “Contributor”. I haven’t had a chance to test it but not in too big of a hurry since my blog is still pretty new.
I think a decent setup is to show ads to all except those of certain roles (like admin and the new supporter role). Hiding ads from bots is also a good idea. Helps prevent fake views.
The purpose of my wanting the above setup is simply to show ads by default (need to pay the bills and ads can help) but allow hiding of ads to users who financially support the blog (why should they see ads when they have given the blog money?). My idea was to eventually offer a donation button of some sort and anyone who donates and notes their user name will get X amount of ad-free time. Say for example they donate $10. That could get them six months of ad-free site access. $20 could get them a year. So on and so forth. Of course I was planning to manually change their user role from Subscriber to Supporter but if there was an automatic method of doing such, it would be great. Of course I assume such features in an ad plugin would be paid features (hopefully not too much lol). If such paid features were to be created, it would be great to integrate with Paypal and other online payment processors so a page could be setup by the blog admin and include a button the Subscriber could click and donate and depending on how much they donate, they get X amount of time as a Supporter with ad-free access to the site. When their time is up, they get switched back to Subscriber.
That’s about it for my ideas for this plugin at this time.
Thank you for taking the time to explain your situation.
I also had the idea of a paid supporter for my own sites, but didn’t have the time to implement it. Since such a feature is rather complex, I would opt to install a membership plugin to manage supporters and their subscriptions.
In this case, Advanced Ads would only need to hook into a capability to disallow / allow ads. Even the free version might be able to do that.
Since others might be interested in the solution too, you can send me the capability a user must have in order to not see ads and I will post the code here.
Thanks
Thomas
“Since others might be interested in the solution too, you can send me the capability a user must have in order to not see ads and I will post the code here.”
Not sure I understand what you are asking. I explained my idea in my previous reply and thought such request was covered in it, unless you are talking about something else.
Basically the only difference between the Subscriber and Supporter is the Supporter doesn’t see ads while the subscriber does. Each have the same set of permissions. With my blog specifically, I have no plans of letting anyone else have any role higher than Subscriber so for me specifically I only need the Admin, Subscriber, and the new Supporter role. For others, not sure. I suspect others would want a choice of who can and cannot see ads based on their roles and probably need the ability to create a new role that is a clone of Subscriber but without the ads. I’m not familiar with the whole plugin system or how plugins work. I just have ideas.
Ad ad plugin or a set of plugins that can work together, that can allow ads to be shown by default while hiding for users who have contributed to the blog I think is a good idea. If it can be automated, even better. I know people don’t like ads but they are a necessary “evil” of websites typically. Running websites cost money and that money has to come from somewhere. The owner of the website may foot the bill for a year or so but sooner or later they will get tired of it. To keep the site alive, it has to pay for itself. If a site becomes really popular, it becomes even more important. This is why I suggested if an automated solution be used to allow the blog owner to setup a page explaining the ads and the contributions. Many probably just don’t think about WHY ads are there.
Sorry, I try to be more specific.
I can not check for a specific role (because they are not really existing or too flexible), but need a capability to check against.
The Contributer, the one that you used as a basis for the Supporter role, can “read”, “edit_posts” and “delete_posts”. Normal Subscribers can only “read”, “Authors” have a bit more rights, etc. (see capabilities).
Therefore, I basically need to attach the check, whether an ad can be displayed to a capability. Based on what you wrote, I can attach it to “edit_posts”, because only Subscribers don’t have this right, but all the other roles have it.
I am going to post a code snipped that you and others can just copy in their theme’s functions.php in order to allow a specific capability to see ads.
Thanks
Thomas
My point was not to let supporters edit posts. Only read (like Subscribers). I just used a role editor to edit the Contributor role so that those in that role (renamed to Supporter) can read just like subscribers and nothing more. The only difference between the two in my setup is one doesn’t see ads.
The original issue I had concerning all this is with a role editor, I created a new role (a clone of Subscriber but renamed) and tried to set it in Advanced Ads to not show ads to that newly created role. However it didn’t show up.
So, I used the role editor to edit the Contributor role (since I’m not using it and have no plans to use it) so that it is exactly the same as the Subscriber when it comes to permissions (can only read) but Advanced Ads can let it be set. As I said though I still haven’t tested this. To test this I would need to create a new user and give it the role and see if it shows ads.
OK, now I got it.
It won’t work as expected, because if you limited the capabilities of the Contributor then the setup won’t work.
However, do you want Subscribers to log in? There is normally no need to, because they still are not able to do more than just read.
The ad display check for the frontend also checks, if a user is logged in, so if you don’t need subscribers (e.g. newsletter subscribers) to really log into the dashboard then you can also choose the Subscriber role to hide ads from them.
Thanks
Thomas
Just wanted to let you know, that there is a new visitor condition available on the ad edit screen that allows you to check if a visitor must be logged-in to see an ad.
There is also a visitor condition that allow you to select the exact capability a logged-in user must have to see an ad in pro now.
Thanks
Thomas
