Node access-control modules for members-only pages I am building a straightforward Drupal 7 site that has public pages and members-only pages. There is just one kind of member. Right now access control does not need to be finer than that. It seems my choices are the modules Content Access, Nodeaccess, Simple Access, node privacy byrole, Taxonomy Access Control and Taxonomy Access Control Lite. To achieve what I need, I could control access either by role, or by using a taxonomy term like "members-only". Both would work.

All these modules are still under development for D7, and are in varying stages of (un)completion and bugginess. For some, development seems erratic or stalled. In addition, their UX's are of varying complexity for the non-sophisticated content editor.

(Another alternative to all of these modules is to create a separate content type for members-only pages, and just use the built-in content-type permissions. That seems inflexible and duplicative, but it is a way out.)

My question is a practical one, given the current reality: which one would you choose for use now or in the next few months, for this use case, and which one seems to have the brightest future?

FOLLOWUP (7 months later): After trying Content Access (CA) and Taxonomy Access Control (TAC), I settled on TAC. Content Access can do by-node access control, but the UX is not simple, and I wouldn't want to subject my editors to it. I find that using a taxonomy term to designate access can essentially be an abstraction mechanism: a single term can represent a complicated set of access choices. For one content type (calendar events), I vary the the access based on taxonomy. For another (members-only pages), I just use a one-term taxonomy vocabulary that is a required field (so its value can't change). So for me, TAC's functionality is a superset of CA. I also needed Field Permissions to selectively expose the fields in calendar events.
Obviously there are a lot of factors that you should consider before deciding whether a module has a "bright" future or not. A very good blog post that describes all the factors that should be considered can be found here (it's based on the old theme of drupal.org but you can still get the point). 

The final decision that you'll take is kind of a "feeling" that you'll get after you 've spent a lot of hours testing modules and banging your head against the wall, only to realize that the module that you picked is not the correct one. However, I will give you the results of a small script that I have and I run in such cases. It gives you the usage count of the modules that you provide as an input, and here they are:


content_access: 24939 users
node_access: 1295 users
simple_access: 1623 users
node_privacy_byrole: 3399 users
taxonomy_access: 6037 users
tac_lite: 3397 users


Note that these results are just information pulled from the drupal.org website and you should not use them to compare the modules. They are just indications that tell you how other users "feel" about those modules that you are examining.

So, to answer your question, I would go for content access module since it supports the per-role access that you mentioned, there are tons of sites that are using it (meaning that it is highly unlikely to be discontinued), its author is someone that has done remarkable work for drupal and the D7 version was updated -relatively- recently.

P.S: if you want the script, lemme know. It's proven very handy in many cases.