How to Restrict Private Content?

I have a website that has some private content that should only be viewable after the user has paid. I am thinking about using something like Google Checkout (other recommendations are fine too), b开发者_JS百科ut from a coding standpoint, how would you go about securely flagging a user as 'paid' and give them access to the private pages? Google checkout seems to be able to accept payments, but how do I know the payment went through programmatically?

Is this something that wordpress or drupal is good for?

You can integrate your application through the Google Checkout API. That API should return a success message once the payment has been approved. The Google Checkout page for order processing mentions these three options:

If you do a custom integration of order processing:

• You'll be notified of new orders via an SSL-secured callback URL that you define.

• You can continue to process orders through the existing order management system you used before integrating with Google Checkout. Google will send you order information in XML messages if you use the XML API or name-value pairs if you use the HTML API as defined by the Notification API.

• You can then issue order processing commands over an SSL-secured channel.

You may still use the Google Merchant Center to process orders if you'd like.

Once you have the success message in your app, you can simply flag their account as paid. Nothing overly complicated.

If you're interested in packages that already integrate with Google Checkout, you can look at this page:

Google Checkout Integration Partners

to expand on the previous answer. you will want to have your customers create an account before you process their payment, and then set their account privileges accordingly on their payment. At that point you can control multiple levels of access through your own user-management system.