Membership allows you to transform your WordPress site into a fully functional membership site – where you can provide access to downloads, online content, videos, forums, support and more through flexible membership levels and options.
Simple to use and massively flexible – this will meet all of your membership sites needs. So if you’d like to create a site like GigaOm, Izzy Video, PSD Tuts, now you can do that with ease!
You can use Membership lite to create…
- A WordPress membership site, offering resources, forums, downloads, videos, support and more… with two different levels of membership and complete customizations.
- Multiple membership sites on a WordPress MultiSite install – so any user of your site can have their own membership site.
Membership Pro
Membership lite is a fully functional but limited version of our full Membership plugin.
This lite version supports a maximum of two membership levels and two subscription levels, as well as a basic set of rules to get you started. This is
enough for most basic membership sites.
Our full version includes many more features:
- Unlimited membership levels!
- Unlimited subscription levels!
- BuddyPress rules – limit and protect access to groups, group creation, pages, blogs, private messageing
- Administration area rules – control blog creation (limit number per level), dashboard widgets, menus and sub-menus, available plugins.
How does it work… well, it’s really easy.
Simply follow the instructions in the installation and configuration guide
You’ll then be able to create Membership ‘Levels’ which can access different types of content, including ‘free’ (i.e users just visiting the site) and/or paid levels.
You can control access to:
- Downloads
- Categories
- Pages
- Posts
- Comments
- ‘More’ tags
- Galleries
- And any content or functionality (like forums!), via multiple different shortcodes
And you can also create two different levels of subscriptions, for example you can decide to:
- Offer free memberships that turn into paid subscriptions after x days
- Finite or indefinite subscriptions
- Serial renewing subscriptions
- Subscriptions that renew every 5, 10, 30, 90 etc. days
- And plenty more…
Perhaps the best thing about this plugin though – besides it’s ease of use and flexibility – is that it’s as much a framework as anything else.
Using our powerful but simple APIs you can add different gateways and rules straight into it with ease – any half decent WordPress developer should be able to do exactly that!
For example, adding gateways is easy – and we’ll be adding plenty more – all you need to do is create a gateway along the lines of one that we supply and you’ll be good to go.
Building a Membership Site
The WPMU DEV Membership plugin makes it very easy to create and manage a membership site for both free and paid subscribers.
Whilst the plugin handles a lot of the work, you will need to spend some time thinking through the structure of your site and how you want to set-up and categorise your content before installing and activating the Membership plugin.
What is a membership site
A membership site can take many guises, from Gigaom Pro which protects long articles and research, through to Izzy video which protects individual videos.
In all cases though, a membership site contains a minimum of two levels of content:
- Free (or teaser) content, which is accessible to everyone and is used to entice potential new members into subscribing (and also help with SEO)
- Members only content, which is only accessible to those who have an active (paid or free) subscription to the site.
We have put together an in-depth instructions guide to help you through using standard WordPress categories to mark posts / content as being accessible to either free users or members only, and then go into some of the more advanced features that allow you to protect individual uploads and distinct sections of a posts content.
