Certain external catalysts have encouraged me to change how I’m keeping things civil here. So I installed a couple of new plugins, and have a new procedure that everyone might as well know about, since it’ll eventually become obvious anyway.

I installed the Membership plugin that Mike Lietz started for me. This plugin allows me to mark certain posts with tokens that grant and prohibit access for specific users. It also provides unique feed links for each of those users so that they can use their regular feed readers to obtain access to the same posts they see when they’re logged in. Of course, those users do need to be logged in to affect this. Otherwise, they’ll see the posts that have been on the site all along – and nothing new.

I then wrote a new plugin, Login Redirect Group, which redirects users in certain membership groups back to the home page instead of taking them into the administration pages. It also provides the nice new login form that you see in the sidebar column.

What does all of this mean? Well, it allows me to continue writing whatever I want, and target it to the readers that should be allowed to read it. It also means that some people won’t have access to everything. It also means that the home page is back.

One of the best things about this is that this functionality - being able to target content to specific groups - is provided within Habari’s core. The extra plugins just provide the interface to it. This is different from other blog tools, like WordPress, that need to have post-based permissions grafted on entirely. The Habari API allows plugins to produce the permission system they need, but enforce it in the core. This pleases me greatly.

Anyway, it specifically serves my purpose in writing here. And you might know those purposes if you had a login. For which, you can ask by emailing me.