For JormunTL 1.2.0
What JormunTL needs from a server, the one setting that matters more than any other, and where we run it ourselves.
JormunTL runs on ordinary WordPress hosting. It needs no VPS, no Redis, no special stack. If your host runs WordPress 6.0 and PHP 7.4 or newer, you are already fine.
There is exactly one setting that will break something if you get it wrong, and it is the page cache. That section is below and it is worth two minutes.
.zip in Appearance → Themes, or SFTP accessShared hosting is fine. So is a managed WordPress plan. The theme and its four companion plugins together are around 5 MB.
Selling advance chapters adds nothing to the list above, but two things are worth having:
mail() is often silently unreliable.
JormunTL has a delivery test built into its settings screen so you can
check rather than assume, and it works with any SMTP plugin.
Your page cache must not serve cached pages to logged-in readers. Nearly every cache plugin does this correctly by default. If yours is configured otherwise, a chapter that one reader unlocked can be served to everybody, including people who have not paid.
The reason is worth understanding, because it applies to any caching layer you add later, not just the one your host ships with. JormunTL decides whether a reader may see a chapter at the moment the page is built, based on who they are and what they have unlocked. A full-page cache saves the finished HTML of whoever arrived first and hands the same copy to the next visitor. If the first visitor had access and the second did not, the second one gets it anyway.
This is not specific to any host. Check it wherever caching lives:
Common on shared hosting, and usually enabled for you. Under Cache → Cache, confirm Cache Logged-in Users is OFF. Under Cache → Excludes, it is worth adding your chapter path so nothing is stored even for signed-out visitors.
Never caches logged-in users unless you switch on user cache in Advanced Rules. Leave that off.
Both exclude logged-in users by default. Confirm Don't cache pages for logged in users is still ticked.
Standard Cloudflare does not cache HTML, so it is safe as it comes. If you
enable APO or write a page rule that caches everything, add a
bypass for the wordpress_logged_in_* cookie.
If you see the chapter, your cache is serving pages to everybody. Fix that before you announce anything, and clear the cache afterwards. Clearing it is a separate step from changing the setting on most plugins, and a stale cached copy will keep leaking until you do.
Give it a minute before re-testing. W3 Total Cache does not delete a purged page, it sets the old copy aside and keeps serving that for about thirty seconds so that clearing the cache cannot send every visitor to PHP at once. Re-checking straight away shows you the old page and looks like the purge failed when it did not.
The check above is about a paid chapter escaping. The opposite happens too, it is more likely, and nobody notices it. A chapter that frees itself on a schedule frees in the database, while the cache carries on handing out the copy with the paywall on it.
Nothing breaks in a way you would see. The site is fast, the page loads, the database is right, and only your readers know they are being shown a padlock on something that is now free.
JormunTL handles this for you. When a chapter stops costing money, the theme tells the page cache to drop that chapter and the novel it belongs to. LiteSpeed Cache, WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and Cache Enabler are recognised, and there is nothing to configure.
The novel page is dropped as well as the chapter, because its chapter list draws a padlock per row: a stale novel page would show a lock on a chapter that has already opened.
If you run a cache that is not one of those five, or a CDN that caches HTML, it will not be told. The theme fires an action you can hook to clear it, documented under Page cache in the filter reference.
To confirm it on your own setup: set a chapter to release a few minutes from now, load it signed out so the paywall is cached, wait for the release to pass, then load it signed out again. You should get the chapter.
Our own demo site runs on Hostinger shared hosting, so what you see there is JormunTL on the same class of plan most buyers are on, not on a server tuned to flatter it.
Their WordPress plans ship with LiteSpeed Cache enabled, so if you go that route, read the LiteSpeed section above first. Out of the box it does not cache logged-in users, which is what you want, but it is worth confirming rather than assuming.
That is an affiliate link. If you buy hosting through it we receive a commission, at no extra cost to you. We recommend them because we pay them for the demo, not because of the commission, and the requirements above are the same whoever you host with. Any host meeting them works equally well.
If you are coming from Madara or Fictioneer, JormunTL includes a migration that reads your existing library and builds the JormunTL equivalent beside it. Nothing the old theme owns is changed or deleted, so you can run it with that theme still installed and go back by switching themes.
Chapters you had behind a Patreon tier or a password in Fictioneer arrive locked, so nothing you were charging for is published by accident on your first day.
The migration tells you what it is about to do before it does it: how many chapters each novel has, how many of them have no text stored and would be skipped, and which novels are image based rather than text. Nothing is written until you have seen that and pressed the button.
Moving between two servers is handled by the same tool, which carries settings, novels, chapters, genres, comments and cover images, and rebuilds the links between them on the way in.
Something here wrong or missing? jormundevtl@gmail.com
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