Restrict content even to specific user

Question

I am developing a membership site that will allow members to access old issues of a magazine produced by a charity.

I have it working up until a point, I can restrict access to each download to the 'subscribers', but I need to restrict access from all downloads available to just those produced when they were a member of the charity?

i.e.

If there are 10 downloads available numbered 111 - 120, and a member joined when issue 116 was produced, and only for four issues, (116, 117, 118, 119), how do I restrict them from accessing 111-115 and 120?

I have thought about adding a Tag element to the user data and entering the issues they are able to download into this area.

Any advice would be good :)

@flomei Thanks for the quick response @Kaiser, thanks for the response

The group goes back 30 years and they produce a quarterly magazine, hence the 120 copies. I have dabbled with php coding in the past, but I have only just started using wordpress, so I am unsure how to integrate my knowledge into the wp format.

I can see how adding a published date to the download and then a date range of the user can be used to produce a result, but if a membership had lapsed and rejoined (as they have), I am not sure how this would be done.

Each download has a 'tag' of the issue number, and I thought that if I had a field in the user table which would be filled with a list of 'tags' for the magazines that they could download, I could then reproduce a table of front page images which would link them to a download page, etc.

Answer 1

You´ll need to save some metadata for the user, possibly in two fields, like member_from and member_until which will hold your issue numbers.

In your "issue view", check whether the current issues number is between the values of those fields. If that´s the case allow access, otherwise show some "meh, no access" or "buy access" notice.