WordPress Plugin: WP-Members (by Chad Butler)

Now it's time for me to install and activate the free WP-Members plugin...



The first thing I had to was restore my test site back to a pristine installation. Basically this meant deactivating any other plugins and removing any pages they had installed. Done.

Next, I needed to add and install the WP-Members Plugin.

I noticed that this plugin has 70K installations, up from the 70K claimed by Simple Membership.

WP-Members did not add any new pages. Instead, it added a new choice under the General Settings tab of the WordPress Dashboard:

I did find where it added a widget, which I dragged to the top of the sidebar.

---

Link: WordPress.org Plug-in Description for WP-Members

---

I notice that the widget, when added to the theme, has an option to "redirect."

At this point, I am assuming that this is where the visitor goes after logging in.

I created a new user inn anticipation of logging in. Of course I used Mickey Mouse (subscriber) as a test user.

Eureka! The new user form NOW asks for street address and phone number. In fact, by default, this information is required!

With the widget in place, and a new user created, I logged in. Then logged out. My status was shown each time.

Next, I visited the RocketGeek home page, and found that the developer (Chad Butler) has some recommended settings for WordPress:

• Uncheck "Anyone Can Register"
• Change Full Text to Summary for each Article in a feed
• Check "Users must be registered and logged in to comment"
• Change PermaLinks to anything else other than what's set as default

The next obvious addition is a new menu choice under Settings, at the bottom. "WP-Members."

Chad has produced three really good videos:
RocketGeek.com/plugins/wp-members/docs/videos/

• The Initial Setup (16 minutes)
• Setting Up Registration Fields (23 minutes)
• Moderated Registration (12 minutes)

For all the power that I've seen built into this plugin, here are the deficiencies that I've found: MailChimp and PayPal integration are premium add-ons. The MailChimp add-on has 1-to-1 field mapping. At $29 and $39, that's not an exorbitant amount of money. I don't begrudge it because Chad has to have some way to monetize his work.

I had to create a support ticket to confirm that if a member pays through the PayPal connection through the PayPal add-on that upgrading the member is automatic. There is also the capability to manually change each user's access to reflect their account status.

---

Link: WP-Members Documentation at RocketGeek.com

---

Now it's time to read more documentation, and then actually implement it on a site....