I just spent a bunch of time diagnosing a problem, and I'd like to understand why it happened, and what other implications I should know about.

Our site would display an error 403 page for an Joomla content manager article, that is controlled by a CBSubs plan. A menu item pointed to the article. I was logged out of the site.

When I put the article under category A, and clicked on the menu item, I got an error 403. This was unexpected.

When I moved the article to category B, and clicked on the menu item, I got a CBSubs message "Access to this content is not allowed without subscription". That was the expected result.

A CBSubs plan controlled both Category A and Category B. The categories were identical in most respects.

However, Category A had access set to "Registered", using the Joomla Content... Category Manger, while Category B had access set to "Public". I changed category A's access to "Public", and then the article under Category A behaved as expected.

I suspect that Joomla's category Access mechanism is stepping in before CBSubs. The 403 error comes from Joomla enforcing the access of "Registered", and denying my logged-out session access to the article. Is my understanding correct?

What I expect CBSubs to do, though, is to be able to work smoothly with the Joomla access restrictions. I'd like to be able to tell CBSubs that it takes precedence over Joomla restrictions, or at least displays its error message first.

Should I instead set Joomla access restriction to "Public" for every item I expect to control with CBsubs?

In any event, I expect the CBSubs documentation to tell me about this issue. I looked particularly in "9.5.6.3 Plans icon area - Integrations Tab - Content sub-tab " (p. 265). I didn't see any mention of Joomla access settings there.

What else should I know about the interaction of Joomla access restrictions and CBSubs?

Thanks in advance for your guidance.