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just finished extensive research into wordpress multi-level membership plugins. conclusion: pay some cash for something! #

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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…

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_help

Soon, tools sprang up to make the job of the people writing the documentation easier. Products such as Robohelp, Author-IT and XDK to name but three.

These were used to translate and imitate the structure of print documentation, with distinct Tables of Contents, Indexes, but gave the additional “wow” factor of search.

And the documentation had to then be translated from (usually) MS Word documents to the help system, which was then compiled into standalone files. These could also be integrated into the computer applications they were designed to help out with – this was the incidence of “Context-Sensitive” help.

Slowly over the decade that followed, additional types of help output were created, HTML, Webhelp, Java, etc.

Then, in the late 1990s, the internet started to grow, and the world became enamoured of the concept of the search box.

Simply put, searching on a set of words you think apply to your situation has become the mainstay of the information revolution. And as the search engines (google, Yahoo and now Bing!) have matured, so the results they return are more and more accurate.

How does this relate to online help?

Well, it doesn’t. But the online help community and those creating the applications for online help, seem not to have realised this.

Subsequent versions of help systems still retain the old qualities of Table of Contents, Indexes (albeit less and less because they have to be manually assembled if you want to make them really accurate), and finally help systems packaged with the applications they apply to.

And the problem with this kind of help is that each change you make has to be rolled-out to every user individually. If it’s presented in an online environment, the help system still has to be opened, new content added, then compiled, then placed in the right place so the people who need it can access it easily.

These kinds of help system aren’t designed to be easily modified. They’re cumbersome and often locked to a single platform (usually Windows). Innovations such as Adobe Air help have begun to address this underlying problem, but for the most part, they’re embellishing a system that’s fundamentally flawed; guilding the lily if you like.

And the lily, to use a metaphor, is now well and truly out of season. Google has proved people search differently now. The internet doesn’t have a table of contents. It certainly doesn’t have an index.

There are better ways to provide online help to users. There are easier ways to provide information to the people that need it. And there are much better ways to spend time than endlessly compiling.

One simple solution is the WIKI.

Many deride the concept of WIKI systems thinking they’re a free-for-all. That attitude must change if information is to be provided efficiently and easily for all concerned. Ease of use doesn’t automatically mean less control – ease of use means time can be spent better. And a centralised system for updating and obtaining help on things you need must be considered if online help is to remain relevant and topical.

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At 3pm I'm finishing up. I'm not supposed to be even working today! My boss is hard to deal with. Oh, my boss is me. **identity-crisis*! #

I'll be damned – I've just installed a bbpress forum for a client site. Much safer than getting hacked #

I wonder what they'll do with people on Macs who get hacked? Oh yeah, mac's don't get hacked! http://www.hurl.ws/a9rn #

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