What I didn’t write about was “membership levels”. That is, where you have different fees for different levels of membership. Frankly, it didn’t occur to me until a client asked for it.

For single-level membership…

For single-level membership, you can (if you’re patient) go with a free system, using a mixture of these plugins:

• WP-e-Commerce – the e-Commerce solution you can use to handle the transaction and send through an invitation code to your new member.
• WP-Invites – which generates an invitation code that can be sent to someone who wants to belong to your site.
• Registered Users Only - which integrates with WP-Invites and provides a field for the new member to enter the above-mentioned code.
• Peters Login Redirect – which gives you a way to redirect a new user login with a specific user role, and creates the new roles for you.
• Members Access – to set specific posts and pages to be only visible to registered users of the site

Once these are installed, you do the following:

• Create an open-ended invitation code in WP-Invites (by entering 3650 in the appropriate field).
• Generate the code.
• Add the code to a standalone text file on your computer.
• Add a new product to your WP-e-Commerce system which will, upon a successful exchange of money for membership, send out an email containing the aforementioned standalone text file to the user in question.
• Using Peters Login Redirect, you choose the landing page for users with a specific user role (in this case, let’s choose “subscriber” which is a standard Wordpress user role)
• Using the Wordpress Settings and General page, set New user default role to “Subscriber” and untick Membership Anyone can register.
• Using Members Access set up the pages and posts which only registered members of the site can see.

The net result is that the new user receives the text file, opens it, and creates a new user registration for themselves using the invitation code. When they login for the first time, they’re a subscriber role and are redirected to a specific landing page. Finally, they can now see the pages marked members only.

Time-consuming, yes, but free!

But what about multi-level membership?

Glad you asked. After two and a half hours of fiddling with a number of very good plugins, all of which ALMOST did the job, including the ones above, I have come to the following conclusion:

Just buy one

I’m a BIG advocate of free software, open-source and other online merriment. But this is an insoluble problem.

Of the plugins I saw, I’m going to try out the WP eMember Plugin (packaged with the Wp e-Store Plugin) for a measley $45US.

The others I saw during my travels to find the now sadly nonexistent magical membership plugin, were either too expensive or too complicated. This one looks nice and clean and (dare I say) simple.

I like simple. Especially after two and a half hours of fiddling against the odds. I feel like Nero, except without the smell of something perhaps burning in the near vicinity…

But what if it’s a page that doesn’t really fit within the browse sequence, an error page for example.

Most themes come with a 404 error page by default. For the uninitiated, a 404 error is where a page you were looking for no-longer exists. If it doesn’t exist, the browser needs to be told about it — with an appropriate error page (and if it’s clever, a 10 second delay before it redirects the visitor to the home page) — or it just displays a rather basic plain text page that says it couldn’t find the page.

But if you need a landing page for specific reasons — say you’re running a membership-only site which does a redirect to a specific landing page in the case where a visitor is trying to view something hidden away — then you need the Exclude Pages plugin.

All Exclude-Pages does is add a checkbox in the page editor which, is ticked by default. A tick means the page can be viewed in the menu. Untick the box and it’s hidden. Simple and easy!

You can install the Exclude-Pages plugin by clicking Plugins and Add New. Then search on Exclude-Pages and then click Install.

The technically enabled can download the plugin from the wordpress Exclude-Pages page.

Thanks to Simon Wheatley for this lovely lightweight plugin!

All you need in advance is a PayPal account and a little patience and, of course, the WP E-Commerce plugin from Instinct Entertainment of New Zealand.

Wp E-Commerce is an all-inclusive plugin which handles everything from stock control, to the addition of your products to the site, right up to securely linking to PayPal or other online services (some of which aren’t yet available in Australia, such as Google Shopping Cart). If you want something easy, secure and with a minimum of fuss, this is the plugin for you!

They also sell several add-ons to change the look and feel of the system, together with adding other options some might want. But for the small business owner selling things online, this is a simple solution to all your needs.

You can install WP E-Commerce by clicking Plugins and Add New, then searching for WP E-Commerce. Then click Install and you’re off!

Advanced users might choose to download then install the plugin by hand. You can do that from the plugin site on Wordpress.

Configuring the plugin is easy, and support is available from the Instinct website.

Add your Paypal details by clicking the Products panel, then Settings.

Then click the checkbox for the payment option you want to use — in most cases this will be PayPal, click Update, then choose it from the Payment Gateway list on the right and fill-in the details. Always click Update when you’re done!

To start adding products, click the Products panel, then Products. Fill in the details on the right and click Update

You can also categorise your products by clicking the Products panel and Categories.

Thanks to Instinct Entertainment for this wholly useful plugin!

What it does is filter comments that are made to your website as compared to a master system on the akismet servers. This will catch the vast majority of comment form SPAM. You can read more about the Akismet service on their website.

To get it working, go to the Plugins panel and Installed. There at the top of the list is Akismet. Just click Activate.

Next, you need a key, which you can get from wordpress.com by creating a new wordpress account here. At this point, it’s unlikely you need a blog, so click just a username please at the bottom!

You’ll be sent an email with the API Key for Akismet, which you enter by clicking Plugins and Akismet Configuration, and pasting the code into the field near the top and clicking Update Options. If all goes well, everything will go green!

Thanks to the wonderful Akismet people for this great system.

TinyMCE gives a bunch of additional functions to the post and page editor toolbar (otherwise known as The Kitchen Sink, which is accessible by clicking ).

Things like creating a table would ordinarily involve clicking the HTML tab and using a lot of Table tags, TR for table row and TD for table content.

You can install the TinyMCE plugin by clicking Plugins and Add New, then searching on TinyMCE Advanced. Then click Install and you’re off!

Alternatively you can download a copy from the TinyMCE Advanced wordpress page.

Once installed, go to the Settings panel and TinyMCE Advanced where a complete list of possible new functions are available. Just drag and drop the boxes to the toolbar above and click Save Changes. The next time you’re creating or editing a page or post, you’ll find the new functions available to you in the toolbars.

Thanks to the plugin developer, Andrew Ozz for this really useful plugin!

Contact form 7 has a major advantage because you can make alterations to the form without resorting to nasty back-end code (which for some of us is fine, but for the less experienced is not). It allows for you to construct a contact form with selections from a drop-down list and by dragging and dropping the form parts around without problem.

Then you just paste the form identifier into the right place and you’re off. A form is a great idea because it means your precious email address is obscured from the spammers.

You can install Contact Form 7 by clicking Plugins and Add New, then searching for Contact Form 7, then clicking install.

Similarly, search for and install Really Simple Captcha by the same means, just searching on “Really Simple Captcha” instead.

The more advanced users out there can download and install Contact Form 7 here and download Really Simple Captcha here on the Wordpress Plugins page.

There’s also a support forum and FAQ to help you learn how to use it available on the contact form 7 website.

Thanks to the plugin developer, Takayuki Miyoshi for these great plugins!

A quick opinion before I start…

There’s a catch with making things members-only: it actually works against page rank and your site SEO. It’s effectively what Rupert Murdoch (among others) is talking about when they say “Google is stealing content” (I’ve written about this and included article links here). The web is (other than the porn and spammers, which I’ll talk about another time) really all about the free dissemination of information. And the more quality information you get out into the web, the more likely you are to get visitors. The more visitors you get, the higher you will appear in search results (as search engines are, effectively, popularity contests). And the higher you get in search results, the more likely you are to get visitors. Ultimately, if Google can’t read it, you may as well not have it there.

In short: think carefully about your reasons for locking parts of your site away for subscribers, paying or otherwise.

First off the rank: Member access

Member Access is a plugin which allows you to lock-off specified posts and pages in your Wordpress site.

Install Member Access by selecting Plugins, then Add new. Now search on “Member Access” and install.

Technical users can download Member Access from the Wordpress Plugins page.

Once installed, you can find global options for the plugin in the Plugins panel. Here is where you set default behaviour, including:

• Set all pages and posts to be accessible to members only
• Redirect non-members to a specific page
• Search and RSS settings for the availability of posts

Then, once you’ve set these, you can specify pages and posts to include for members only in the editor.

Thanks to Chris Abernathy for this great plugin!

Second in line: WP-Members

WP-Members is another plugin which does effectively the same job, but you need to set-up the page excerpt (if any) that’s available for non-members to read prior to having to join-up.

This is achieved, according to the instructions which are found on the ButlerBlog, with the <!–more–> link, which you can insert in the HTML tab in any new or existing page or post. This means the usage is slightly more tricky than with Member Access.

You can install WP-Members by clicking Plugins and Add New. Then search on WP-Members and install.

Alternatively, you can download and then install the WP-Members plugin from the Wordpress Plugins page.

Thanks to the ButlerBlog for this plugin!

Third we have: Members Only

Members Only appears to be the Wordpress equivalent of the WebDav login you get on some sites, which locks content away from prying eyes en-masse. In other words, if you want to prevent anyone BUT members seeing anything on your site, this is the plugin to use.

Non-members are directed to the login page where they can create a login account on the site.

You can install WP-Members by clicking Plugins and Add New. Then search on Members Only and install.

Alternatively, you can download and then install the Members Only plugin from the Wordpress Plugins page.

Thanks to developer Andrew Hamilton for this plugin.

FYI – turn OFF comments and options in the Settings panel by clicking Discussion, then turning off the checkboxes for:

• Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)
• Allow people to post comments on new articles

Comments are okay on blog posts, news and the like, but they look odd on fixed pages. That’s just my opinion of course!

Extended Comment Options allows a bulk switch-off of these on existing posts and pages.

You can install it from the Plugins panel by clicking Add New, then searching for “Extended Comment Options”.

Advanced users can download the Extended Comment Options plugin from the Wordpress plugins page.

Many thanks to the developer, Mark Kenney, of Being Mr. Kenney.

Sometimes things don’t work, but you can take precautions by backing-up your data.

DBC Backup will do this automatically for you, but does need some slightly technical know-how.

You can install DBC Backup by clicking Plugins and Add New. Then search for DBC Backup and click install.

Alternatively, you can download a copy from the plugin homepage, where instructions are to be found on the configuration of the plugin.

We’re using DBC backup on all our blogs, but — in the spirit of covering ourselves — make no undertakings as to the accuracy or quality of backups you’ll receive using this plugin!

Congratulations to the plugin developer, T3 Designs for their work.

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