Right now, there’s a limited number of options to run a membership site with WordPress. There are a few decent solutions, such as Your Members and aMember, but I’d like to see a few other concepts.
I believe Your Members is not quite there and aMember is too robust for most users needs. Trust me, I spent about two months researching different membership solutions for ThemeHybrid.com, and just about everything I’ve looked into is usually too complicated or not developed enough.
I don’t want to knock any of the great pieces of software and code currently out there because some of these work as great solutions.
The ideal membership plugin
Well, I’m sure you might have a bit of input on this, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
What I’d like to see is something that works as well as the Role Manager plugin with easy-to-assign roles and capabilities packaged with a way to let users pay for membership through systems such as PayPal and Google Checkout.
Ideally, the site admin would set up user roles, such as “member,” “trial,” or whatever. With the functionality of Role Manager, it’d be easy to section off parts of the site (or the entire site) according to what the user is allowed to do.
We see WordPress moving into many directions every day, and I’m sure there are a lot of people looking for an easy-to-integrate membership solution.
Any developers?
I’d personally write the code for this myself if I knew enough about how payment systems worked and learned a bit more about the user role/capability system in WordPress. But, I’m limited for time myself, and a project of this magnitude would take a bit more than I have to spare at the moment.
If anyone’s interested in collaborating on such a project, I’d be more than willing chip in as much as possible with coding.
If no one’s interested, then I’ll probably still try to write the code for it. Of course, it might be a while before I’d even have a workable solution built.
If the plugin I’m asking for exists, then link to it, but I’ve yet to come across one that truly handles things in a very user-friendly way.
Ideas? Suggestions? I’d love to hear them.
Oh, and one more thing: I’d like for a plugin like this to be completely GPL and open to everyone within the WordPress community.
I find it hard to answer posts like this,I agree YM is not quite there yet and I think the day people say their product is there is the day you stop buying the product.
However that said people want to buy a working product and I think YM is now at that stage, I have seen some pretty impressive YM sites to back that up. What is great is that while not an open source project we still have a community, those who engage with us are dictating YM future which is really cool and it has become so much more then a simple membership plugin with features that people wanted (asked for) which are unique to it alone because we hopefully listen to our customers.
Anyway enough ranting about how good I think YM is the point I was making closed source or open its about a two way engagement if we don’t engage with the customer, they get a bad experience, if the customer doesn’t engage with us then really not much we can do and nothing moves forward your plugin fails to develop. Though we always like thanks we can deal with negative comments and it’s the only way things improve the worst thing for us is no feedback or “is not quite there” comments with no prior warning no one wins unless they happen to be a programmer who wants to write their own plugin.
I wish you luck and I hope you continue to use YM the latest version is not bug free but we can only carry on moving it forward with the community telling us the direction and that is everyone not just those buying dev licenses even your good self if you chose to engage
Good luck with your own endeavours I hope they prove fruitful.
p.s Your still on the Christmas card list
Tim
Don’t get me wrong, I think YM is a great plugin. I’m not out to make anyone’s product look bad. I’ve even recommended YM to a few friends. I did want to specifically point out your plugin as a good solution though, and sorry if I came off too negative.
I have lots of specific feedback I’d like to give you guys once I get some time to sit back and put it all down into words.
This was actually a post I was planning on writing before I ever saw YM.
Thanks for taking the time to stop by and comment.
It wasn’t negative just a bit of a bolt out of the blue, and we would love feedback good, bad downright ugly
I guess it sort of caught me off guard and a bit defensive mainly because we are so keen on the idea community rules that in many ways YM has much more of a community feel then most open source projects which are dominated by one or two peoples ideas. GPL projects tend to need a strong leader particularly when you can take it so many directions. We have the advantage that in many ways we need to do the opposite keep stum and listen to what the community wants after all the customers are “normally” right
May I suggest WP-Sentry by Pete Holiday. I’ve used this plugin extensivly and it’s very easy to use and has low overheads on the system. Currently, the plugin is not overbloated meaning it’s a good foundation for further development.
I just made one:
http://www.memberwing.com/
Supports free teasers - good for SEO and “findability” of you site. Has 4 levels of memberships: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum.
Supports any Wordpress theme and can be used for already existing sites as well as new ones.
Simple and fast…
Let me know if you’ll have a chance to test it.
GE.
Tim
I’ll have to write a post one of these days about how great YM is.
groovy
I’ve tried out WP Sentry too. I actually prefer Role Manager’s way of handling things over it. Of course, I’m a bit more inclined to write custom code, which is what I do with Role Manager.
GE
Thanks for linking to your plugin. I’ll definitely give it a test to see how it performs.
I’m good in PHP/WP coding, but not comfortable with payment systems. However, and I think your ideal Membership plugin for WP is not available.
I’ve seen a plugin called WP User Manager but it does need hooks and is dependent to other plugins. The first time I discovered it was when Small Potato published How to Use Wordpress as a Membership Directory.
Have you tried http://wp-member.com/ ?
Subscriptions & protected content with payments via Paypal.
We like you have been looking for a decent plugin… but have not found the one we need on the market.
My decision was to develop one our selves which we plan on releasing free to publishers in our network next week.
There is however a catch…
One of the things that people do not realize is that a full featured and reliable ecommerce system with built in affiliate program and all the bells and whistles that can be integrated into any site is not only hard to come by but difficult to develop…
And I am not talking about a paypal support only ecommerce solution. We have developed our own platform over the years which now supports three ecommerce publishing and affiliate networks. We have integrated PayPal, Authorize.net, and 2checkout offering every payment strategy under the sun.
Since our platform has been in use for a couple years now by thousands of publishers in each of our networks and since it is beyond stable and now a solid enterprise solution we decided the best thing for us to do was to release a simple post api to send data where it needs to go after the payment is processed, the affiliate referrals tracked, and the client logged into our system.
For this reason we added the ability to post to up to 5 urls for each transaction so that a person running a site can use our platform to handle their back end ecommerce and affiliate management and then post to scripts like Wordpress, vBulletin, SMF, Ning etc so that they can easily turn one transaction into a series of automated account creations at their various periferal account holding systems.
This week we are working on the wordpress membership plugin. It will work with our Post API out of the box… plug it into your blog and our system will post to it, create accounts, post to it and delete or suspend or reactivate accounts etc.
My hopes are to release this plugin opensource so that people can mod it beyond our first version to go beyond the out of the box.
Having funded and managed the development of 4 entreprise level ecommerce platforms I can say that is the most challenging part and I think with a base opensource WP membership plugin that it is better to have people focus on making it do the things they want and just plugging it into a solid tested and robust ecommerce platform.
I was actually hoping that YM would not be so locked down when I saw their “developers license” but seeing the registration requirement was a deal killer for me.
So we decided to start developing our own and then see what our clients can do with it when we make it open.
Josh Anderson
Hey David, thanks for the mention.
At the minute we are having a 25% off sale.
I’ve created a 25% off discount coupon for users of justintadlock.com, the code is: justintadlock
wp-Member is designed to fit closely to wordpress allowing the site owner to install their usual plugins ect. We feel that too many membership systems try to be too specific. wp-Member creates a membership platform that can be generally used for every sites needs.
After all, it is the number 1 result on google.com for “Best Membership Plugin”.
Thanks again for the mention.
@Josh Anderson,
Any update on your release date?
We are working to include automated payment processing via Paypal to MemberWing.
It is actually already working we just need to add nice admin interface to generate Paypal buttons and let admins to setup prices for different levels of memberships.
I’ll update people on our list once update is ready.
Our main points:
- Simplicity and speed.
- Support for the latest version Wordpress.
- Best possible SEO features.
- Keep it free for all.
Latest working version:
http://www.MemberWing.com
Gleb
You might also be interested in a Wordpress plugin (Suma) which was purpose built from the ground-up to be a Membership and Billing system for a Wordpress blog.
This plugin arose out of necessity when I was building a paid-subscription newsletter/website with Wordpress. I needed a solution to take care of the content access, membership and recurring billing aspects. My first approach was to combine several different existing plugins, but this wasn’t successful. Its simply too integrated a problem to be solved by separate plugins. Then I tried some of the more generic solutions, but I felt they also were not giving a good fit and made the website look a little rough around the edges and clunky. So I designed and built the plugin I was looking for.
The Suma plugin integrates with PayPal for payment processing but offers visitors the ability to pay using either PayPal or a Credit Card. I got some inspiration from the PostLevels plugin and a few others, but there is actually much more to it when you’re building a commercial payment system. For instance, to be Visa PCI compliant (i.e. to be able to receive credit card payments online) the solution must be using the https protocol when transmitting cc numbers, plus CVV numbers can’t be logged anywhere in the system. Also if you are going to charge users money to access your website, you should have a legal agreement in place defining appropriate use of the site which they consented to during the registration process. These were some challenges that the plugin needed to accomplish (and does). Its aspects like these that really separate a rough combination of scripts from a commercial grade solution/product which is what I believe I created by incorporating many practical matters that I learned from building previous e-commerce websites.
Suma is definitely not for every situation though. It doesn’t, for instance, do donations or one-off payments; its purpose built specifically for for making paid-content newsletter sites using Wordpress. If that’s what you’re looking for, then you can find more details at http://sumaplugin.com.
cheers,
Brenton
Hello All,
We at Synergy Software Group, have just built a new WordPress Membership plugin. It’s not yet Publicly Released, however we are currently giving away free one-site licenses! You can find it at http://www.wp-membership.com/dev-preview/
Ben Ward
Lead Developer
Synergy Software Group, LLC