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…
