Membership
Independent reporting for the harbor, paid for by its readers
Most of the Ledger is free and stays free. A free account adds the briefings and election coverage. Silver opens our culture desk; Gold opens the investigations and Ledger Reports that take months. Take both and you read everything.
Already a member? Sign in with the email you used at checkout.
Member-aware: Gold members see a thank-you, a link to their account and the Silver add-on instead of the plan cards; everyone else sees both plans. A plan card can sell a subscription: put a selling plan ID in its settings (the editor lists the product’s plans), or leave it empty on a subscription-only product.
What each membership opens
| Free | Signed in | Silver | Gold | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| City Hall, transit, science and most news | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Corrections and most city guides | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Every briefing and our election coverage | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| The editorial board | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Culture desk, features, the arts briefing and Fennel Hill guides | — | — | ✓ | — |
| Investigations and Ledger Reports | — | — | — | ✓ |
For testers: getting a membership tag
Membership on the Harborview Ledger is a Shopify customer tag: silver-member opens Silver stories, gold-member opens Gold stories and both together open everything. Signed-in stories need only an account. There are three ways to get a tag for testing, or switch to one of the test accounts listed in the Test lab.
Buy a plan
Each card shows the live Shopify price and goes straight to checkout, signed in when you are. It works without JavaScript and whether or not Shopify’s own plugin is installed. The cards expect products with the handles gold-membership and silver-membership, published to the Headless channel, and a Storefront token in RedeemID → Settings. A Flow workflow (below) tags the buyer so paying grants the level.
Tag the customer by hand
In the Shopify admin, open Customers, pick your test customer and add the tag gold-member (and silver-member for the “all of” box). Shopify sends customer.tags_added; once the Shopify admin’s webhook log shows the delivery, reload the gated page. “Refresh membership” below (and in the header) pulls the tags straight away; signing in again does too.
Buy a membership product
In Shopify Flow, add a workflow that tags the customer gold-member when an order for the Gold product is paid, and one that removes it on cancellation (the plugin’s docs/shopify-flow.md has the recipes). Buy it with the test customer (Shopify’s Bogus Gateway works on a dev store). The tag webhook unlocks Gold within seconds, or press Refresh Membership.
Your Shopify account
| Signed in | … |
|---|---|
| Display name | … |
| Linked to a Shopify customer | … |
| Account created by Shopify sign-in | … |
| Membership last synced | … |
| Shopify sign-in available | … |
| Session ready for account actions | … |
Checking who you are…