New to the community? Start here

How do I go about creating a service membership on my site?

@judah3 or @rastalamm. I am trying to put together a monthly membership for my web-site where clients can sign up, it automatically charges their credit card each month, and they are awarded "points" each month that they can use, rollover, and apply towards massage appointments they make each month. I have Appointments+, MarketPress, MyCRED, and Membership to do this, but have no idea how to go about it.
Thanks!

More Appointments+ discussions
Appointments+
  • Judah

    Hey @Jaylyn,

    Recurring payments cannot be done with marketpress : thread. You should probably use Protected Content if you want to implement that feature.

    The newest version of MyCred allows you to award credits per product. So I am not sure how this works with the subscription feature in Protected Content.

    As for the points rolling over - the way MyCred works is that it will just have a total amount of point your user has and they won't expire. So rolling over wouldn't be an issue.

    Applying credits to Appointments+ - you can do two things.
    1. Enable MyCred as a payment gateway for Appointments+ so users can "pay" for your services/appointments with you
    2. As soon as a user books an appointment you can have the system automatically check their balance and if they have credits it will allow them to make the booking and deduct a credit.

    I'm sure someone from WPMU can help you with setting up the Membership plugin.

    If there is anything else I can help you with or you have questions, please let me know!

  • Michael Bissett

    Hey @Jaylyn, hope you're doing well today! :slight_smile:

    In regards to enabling myCRED to be used with Appointments+, you'll actually have to enable the MarketPress integration first, by going to:

    Appointments -> Settings -> General

    And inside the "Payment Settings" section, after setting "Payment required" to "Yes", you'll want to make sure that the box for "Integrate with MarketPress" is checked

    Then, you'll want to go to:

    myCRED -> Add-ons

    And enable the Gateway add-on there. :slight_smile:

    As for the awarding of points upon renewal of a membership (inside of either our Membership or Protected Content plugins), that would require some custom coding, as you'd need to create a custom function that would grant points to a user upon renewal.

    This'd be something that you'd want to post on our Jobs Board about, and have one of our Pros cook up a solution for you. Let me get the link to that here:

    https://premium.wpmudev.org/wordpress-development/

    Hope this clears things up here!

    Kind Regards,
    Michael

  • Judah

    Hey @Jaylyn,

    I am unsure of how the Subscription works in the Membership Plugin or the Protected Content Plugin.

    When it comes to Marketpress, if you have the most recent version of MyCred (released a few days ago) you can now reward someone credits if they buy a product. So you can create a product called 10 credits and every time someone buys that, it will reward the user with 10 credits. You can call the products whatever you want and assign any credit amount to those products.

    Ideally, if you can have the Plugin auto purchase that product on a monthly basis(ie. subscription), it process of giving users credits based on a monthly subscription will work.

    I hope that clears it up a bit!

    Someone from WPMU DEV Team should have more answers related to how the Membership plugin you are using works.

  • Judah

    I am not familiar enough with the Membership plugin to know if that would work.

    I do know that there is no certificate redeeming feature built into appointments+ .

    As of now, its either a user needs to pay for a booking or not pay.
    They can pay with paypal and a few other gateways, or with credits. Additionally, you can set Appointments+ to automatically deduct credits when a user makes an appointment. (That requires a little bit of extra code in your functions.php file). If you would like to do something like that, I spent months trying to figure it out and finally (with the help of WPMU) was able to solve it.

    I'm sure someone from WPMU DEV will be able to answer your question though..

    Sorry I can't help you out on that.. If you have any more questions, please post it and I will try my best to help you!

  • Michelle Shull

    Hi, Jaylyn!

    To automatically award Membership subscribers a certain amount of credits/points each month, you'll need to have some custom work done. MyCred is already set up to award points based on behavior, but since it doesn't directly integrate with Membership (like it does with MarketPress) you'd need to have someone code you up a tool to award (x)points for (x)membership.

    You've got the tools in place, you'll just need a dev to take this the final few steps to a custom solution like the one you want.

    Thanks for your question!

  • Jaylyn

    Okay. I wasn't aware when I was told these plugins would do the job, that I was also going to have to pay for custom work. I just can't afford that, and I have no idea who even does that sort of thing. I figured since you guys recommended these plugins, you must have had some experience doing this and knew how to tell me to set it up. If I have to do custom work, I'm going to have to unsubscribe and find some other service completely.

  • zmonk

    Hello, Michelle Shull! Hi Judah!

    At some point i can very good understand Jaylyn. Why? Because of all promises WPMU-Dev-Website does. Take a look at the screenshots i've attached.

    And since it just need a

    function to award (x)points for (x)membership.

    at these point i'm somehow expecting these function to be delivered from the membership which costs me 100$ a month.

    And not to forget these "function", which Jaylyn have asked for, can afterwards be selled as an extra feature and make your plugins standout more. (Maybe it's an interesting feature request?)

    Please correct me if i have too high expectitions. I'm very new to WPMU-Dev, so these case is interesting for me too, just to know where the support from WPMU-Dev ends and to make a decision if the 100$ membership is worth it.

    Best Regards
    zmonk

  • Judah

    Hey@zmonk,

    First off I want to say that I do not work for WPMU DEV and have no affiliation/association other than the fact that I too pay for membership to use their software and receive support (both good and bad).

    I completely understand your and @Jaylyn's points. I think the issue here is between customization and support.

    What WPMU DEV means by support is that they will help you install their plugins and troubleshoot the issues one has with them. (Ex: plugin conflicts, not working properly, bugs, crashes etc..)

    When it comes to writing customized code for each and every user, I believe, is beyond the scope of what we are paying for.

    I have received both support and customization from WPMU DEV. I guess I may have been one of the lucky one's but I think the best thing to do is figure out exactly what customization's you would like to be done and post exactly what you need. That has worked for me in the past. Additionally, the customization's I was looking to do have been on the featured request list for years or have been in one of the plugins WPMU offers/supports.

    I also do a thorough research of the problem via Google and on sites like stackoverflow and github. You can usually modify other peoples' solutions/codes (if you can read/write html/php etc). If you do not know how to code you can either learn or hire out. I would not expect anyone, including WPMU DEV, to figure out and develop my website for me - its not fair to expect that.

    For Jaylyn, she is looking for a customization in a plugin (MyCred) that is not supported by WPMU. I suggest you reach out to the lead Dev of My Cred (his name is Gabriel and has helped me with customization's). You can ask him how to do that or adapt the instructions here to your needs. You can also check out sites like odesk and elance for freelance dev's.

    **Please note that this is a support forum and people are here with their questions and answers. If you are upset or unhappy with the service you are receiving I suggest reaching out to the WPMU DEV customer support team and let them know. They are usually quite good at getting back to users promptly.

  • zmonk

    Hey @Judah,

    thank you very much for your answer.

    It has clarified many things for me:

    1. I thought you are a Stuff-Member of WPMU-Dev (because of your "ELITE"-badge)
    2. "between customization and support" - thank you for finding the right words for our discussion.
    3. I supposed MyCread is a creation of WPMU-Dev.

    Additionally, the customization's I was looking to do have been on the featured request list for years or have been in one of the plugins WPMU offers/supports.

    Where can i find these feature requests lists / roadmaps?

    I suggest reaching out to the WPMU DEV customer support team and let them know

    I appreciate you giving me this hint - these was also not clear for me. I thought these is official support channel, where i can ask someone - "what am i actually getting for my bucks?".

    Where can i get these customer support you've mentioned?

  • Judah

    Hey @zmonk,

    1. I am not exactly sure what the titles mean but I pay annually for access to all of the WPMU Plugins/themes. If you use more than a few, its totally worth it.
    2. Glad I could clarify that for you!
    3. Mycred is developed separately outside of WPMU - The developer has integrated it with multiple eCommerce systems (Woocommerce and most recently Marketpress). It is heavily integrated with BuddyPress and what I think the original intent was to provide some type of gamification for your website and buddypress users (buddypress is best used to create some type of social networking site that allows your users to interact with each other.) WPMU DEV is 'familiar' with MyCred. They don't support issues with the plugin, but do have suggestions and ideas on what do to (sometimes even codes/solutions) if you want it to interact with various WPMU Dev plugins. Here is an example of that.

    In order to find a feature request you can go here - and select features & feedback - (Screenshot)

    You can also search the forums for keywords and questions you have and most likely they have been addressed in the past. If not, you can create a new question and someone usually gets back to you in less than 24 hrs.

    In order to contact the WPMU DEV customer support team - go to this page and select a topic that addresses your issue (You can also select - "I have a different question")

    Again - if you have any new questions/issues/suggestions for plugins/themes you can always create a new thread/question.

    Let me know if you have any other questions.

    Judah

Thank NAME, for their help.

1 Point
5 Points
15 Points
Other

Let NAME know exactly why they deserved these points.

Gift a custom amount of points.