Hi. I'm really excited about using aMember for my Podcast site. Part of the plan is to set up a portion of our site where subscribers (for a fee) can download our shows before they are released to the public. I understand how I could protect an mp3, but I'm wondering if I can protect a Podcast feed (an rss .xml file). Users would add the feed address to their podcatcher (iTunes, etc) when prompted enter their username and password (iTunes supports this) and then subscribe to the feed. Is this possible with aMember? If so how (just so I can test it out before I purchase). Alex your software is great and if the above is possible, you'll have an IMMEDIATE purchase on your hands (and a free subscription to our site). Thanks! Grant
Grant, it of course will work - just use htpasswd protection in aMember, and it will be compatible with iPods.
OK, I know this was forever ago, but did you ever find a solution to protecting your feeds? My theory which I'm working on now, is to us the below code to pull a freely open RSS feed (just not publicizing it) from a protected PHP file/directory. Is this what you would suggest? I hope it works! <?php $feed = file_get_contents('http://www.website.com/protectedfeed/premiumxyz'); echo $feed; ?> Thanks!
Alex, we recently purchased amember for this very purpose. Can you please enlighten as to the process in making this work without the access conflicting with Wordpress URLs? Thank you for any insight, as I just opened a ticket with added details... I'm sure it's just some htaccess magic not in the documentation...
The way I teach it is to place both the RSS feed and the content in an amember protected htpasswd directory. This will give itunes users a password popup when they try to access the feed. The link format you use: itpc://www.yoursite.com/podcast/podcast.xml|iTunes Podcast David
Be sure to protect the directory using Basic Auth protection (ie. not rewrite) Also, I would suggest not putting the feed itself in the protected directory since you can use it as a marketing mechanism. Perhaps leave the first file of the feed in an unprotected directory as a preview/sales pitch for the remaining. Use the summary field of the PodCast and the Basic Auth banner message to describe how to register for access to the full content.
Super, I believe I actually have the protection working, but unfortunately with the Wordpress .htaccess file in the root, it's causing it not to work properly. If I disable or rename that file, all is well. How can I keep all the nice permalinks without moving Wordpress and updating all links, etc.? Any magic htaccess rewrite suggested? I read something about some sort of loop not being handled properly. I'm sure it's some tricky rewrite issue, but with that tweak, we should be good to go. Thank you for any insight! I'll try to share my findings when we get there.
I think part of your issue may be that you are trying to protect the feed, try only protecting the media files and see if that gets you sorted out.
skippybosco, I actually had not thought about only protecting the media. Great idea! Do you have a feed that iTunes can authenticate this way using htpasswd? Would iTunes simply not display the items with protected enclosures? BTW: The htpasswd protection within a wordpress directory is working now: It appears that just having a 401.shtml file in the root directory was enough to allow Wordpress to not handle the redirect error, so authentication is presented on my protected directory instead of page not found. I suppose now I might be able to protect my feed for iTunes using something like this: <?php $homepage = file_get_contents('http://www.website.com/category/podcast-prem/feed/'); echo $homepage; ?> The plan is to have 2 feeds: - 1 Free, updated once per week - 1 Paid, updated every day Getting there!
The user is presented with all of the items in your feed, but when they try to download a protected one they will be prompted to login (pop up authentication box)