From time to time I get a client asking me if it is possible to turn there WordPress powered site into a membership site. Paid content, monthly and yearly memberships, the whole nine. I have often approached this idea with some reserve having tried a few membership plugins and softwares, I have not found one that is super simple for the end user to navigate (and more importantly not break). Every time I was approached with the question, I set out on Google to see if anything new had been released in this area and this time around much to my joy, I was greated by Your Member. Your Members – The WordPress Membership Plugin, created by Uk company Cambridge New Media Services and selling for $50 (Single)/$200(Developer) looks like that just solution I have been looking for. I dropped by the forums momentarily, as it is always a good test to see how current and active they are. At least if they are current and fairly active you know there is some sort of support available whether it be via the creators or other users. That and I wanted to be sure that they where keeping pretty consistent with updates being that 2.7 is about to make it’s review. Looking pretty good so I dropped the $50 on a single license for a clients site.
Dowload, Install, activate plugin and configure via a standard wp-admin interface. No over the top modifications to your theme and some very easy to navigate set up. Have a look:
There you have it, pretty straight forward, get your member levels in order, set up your payment gateway, customize messages and that is just the basics of getting your site ready to go for membership. There are a ton of options in here, if you take some time to dig in and look around. RSS tokens, pay per post, easy to use pages excludes the list goes on and I imagine it will grow as the popularity of this plugin grows.
Ok so you have set up the basics of your member levels and pricing, now all you need to do is navigate to the normal post panel and get to writing your article following the normal steps you would take to create and publish. When you are done navigate down the right hand sidebar (WP 2.6.3) and you will see your member options. Choose the appropriate member categories for which you would like to designate this post then move back to the post area enclosing the members only portion of your post using the [private][/private] tags. Publish and you should be all set. You can also designate a post for purchase outside of the member options if you would like by using the same simple admin interface. Now if all is well you should be able to log out of your WP admin and return to the home page of your blog to see the new post + post teaser (if you left part open) and custom message telling your readers that they need to login or signup to view the rest of the content. Easy as that. Another nice feature here is the number of widgets available for you sidebar allowing you to easily add a signup/login form or account status info area.
There are a number of other features and little tricks to the software but as I am quite new to it and still in the discovery phase I will leave you to check out the rest and decide for yourself. You can have a look at the plugin page here or visit the forums here.
It’s my opinion and I have yet to put it through all the tests, but so far I am extremely pleased and would say that this is a great solution for creating a simple easy to use membership ship site via the WordPress platform. If you have had any experiences with it, let me know what you think.