Restrict Content Pro has been around for a long time, but for a few years it was the third leg on Pippin Williamson and friends’ product landscape. It’s always been a solid, but limited product.
It’s still limited, but their team has gone all in to really make it shine for the features it has. Today, I think RCP is a really solid, simple, membership and subscription platform for managing restricted content. It certainly doesn’t have every feature, but it has the basics, and more importantly, it’s extensible, and now a first-class citizen in their suite of products.
Version 2.5 has huge changes to subscriptions and subscription management, making it a solid option for a basic membership website with recurring renewals.
Another feature I’m loving is the REST API that has full features for reading, creating, updating, and deleting content. The REST API for RCP is built on the WordPress REST API infrastructure. I asked Pippin a few questions about that process, as he built the feature himself and it was his first deep dive into the REST API:
Did you encounter any surprises?
No major ones that come to mind.
Could you describe the difference having the WP API infrastructure in core, versus not having it when you build the EDD REST API?
Using the WP API as a base saved a TON of work.
Enormous amounts of work. Some things we didn’t have to do when using WP API:
- Authentication (API keys for example)
- Custom permission checks
- Query detection
- Parsing URLs
Only thing we had to do was register our endpoints (like registering a post type), register our routes, and then tell WP what data to return at each of those.
Was the documentation for extending the infrastructure fairly clear and easy to find? Or was it mostly code driven docs you used?
It was pretty good. I would have loved to see better documentation about parsing query/post parameters sent in with the requests, as that wasn’t very clear and it took me a bit of experimentation to get it working properly.
The API in RCP does not require the WordPress REST API plugin (endpoints), as it’s built with custom endpoints on the infrastructure of the REST API that was included with the release of WordPress 4.4.
A final thing to note is that Pippin changed pricing and pricing structure with this release. I think product makers will be interested in the language he used.
First, all customers can get hassle-free renewals so you no longer need to worry about renewing your license to keep the plugins up to date and retain access to support. We will handle it all for you. And if you do want to manually renew or wish to stop using the plugin, you can cancel at any time from your account page.
Now that’s a clever way to say you’ve set automated annual pricing 🙂 As I’ve noted before, some folks report going from 20-30% manual renewal rates to 60-80% auto-renewal rates. This alone can double your company’s revenue (Pippin told me his goal is to triple RCP revenue this year, this is a huge part of that). Are you doing auto-renewals yet? I’d love to hear the impact it’s had on your business.
Check out the complete update to RCP on the plugin release blog post, as I didn’t cover many of the new features.
