Subscription question

[MansfieldMan]

As a newbie, can someone please point me to documentation, or educate me, about how Calibre handles periodicals that require paid subscriptions for full content?

As I scan the list of news periodicals in Calibre, the titles don't appear to indicate whether subscriptions are required.

If you DO have a paid subscription (such as I do, to the Washington Post), is it necessary to create one's own custom recipe to get full content? The standard WaPo recipe in Calibre just brings in the free content. I have now created a custom recipe by adding the "needs_subscription = True" line, but I'm wondering if this is always what must be done, and whether there's any way to know which periodicals are restricted.

Thanks!

[kovidgoyal]

Any recipe that supports subscriber content will ask you for your username and password when you try to subscribe to it. Try for example the wall street journal.

As for WaPo, just adding needs_subscription = True is not enough, you also have to implement the actual login code in the recipe see https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/news.html

[MansfieldMan]

I've implemented the code below in my custom recipe, but I get an error, no form matching name 'wpIdnSignInForm'.

def get_browser(self):
br = BasicNewsRecipe.get_browser(self)
if self.username is not None and self.password is not None:
br.open('https://subscribe.washingtonpost.com/loginregistration/index.html#/register/group/long?action=login')
br.select_form(name='wpIdntSignInForm')
br['username'] = self.username
br['password'] = self.password
br.submit()
return br

[kovidgoyal]

That page looks like it uses javascript for login so the login will not be that easy. You'll need to capture the login POST request using a browser's develeopment tools and manually send the request in the recipe instead of just filling in a form.