Custom plugin for checking subscriptions with external service - where to intervene?

mbtuckersimm
Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:37:15 +0000
Software Support

I’m trying to develop a custom OJS plugin to check IP-based subscriptions with an external service (which I control). We have our IP ranges stored in an already-existing database that predates our adoption of OJS, and it’s infeasible for us to transfer all of our subscriber data into the OJS database.

I’ve looked at the subscriptionSSO plugin, but I’m not sure it does what we want; users are identified solely by IP address, not by logging into some kind of SSO service.

I’m trying to understand what is the correct architecture for our plugin, and I have a few questions:

1. Which hooks should we register callbacks for in order to check access?

2. Once we have a response from our API, what do we do in the two different cases? For instance, we might want to redirect them to a page (either in OJS or elsewhere) with information about how to subscribe; or we might want to show them a modal dialog with that same information.

We’re currently on OJS 3.4.0.10, if that matters.

7 posts - 2 participants