Now that we have a better understanding of how our plugins work and fit together, we are going to try our hand at customizing one for our site. This will hopefully give us the understanding and confidence to make any other customizations we need in the future.
As with modules, it is often easier to find a plugin that does most of what we want it to do and then make changes to it so that it meets our needs more completely.
Looking back over our goals, one that requires a plugin is that we want to limit access to certain parts of our content to only our paying subscribers. This effect is going to be best achieved via content plugin, so we chose the Ninja Access plugin to fill this need.
To use Ninja Access we first need to mark the content we want to restrict with special tags and indicate the user groups we want to see what is contained within the tags. When the page is produced, the plugin reads the visitor's user group and then compares it to the ones in the list provided...