Amember with wordpress – a trial

Install Amember

• Download the trial to somewhere on your web server.  If re-uploading to another server, do it in binary
• If you don’t have it Get and load the zend optimiser.  (or ioncube) To install you will need to know where php and apache are on your server.
• If haven’t setup DB yet, do it now, else same as wordpress.
• Browse to amember location.  Configuration script will run.  You will need your mysql details – I used same as wordpress, except for table names.
• I got a bunch of warnings about tables that did not exist and functions that are deprecated.  No output due to headers sent.  tried to refresh, told me /config.inc.php already existed and I had to delete it.  I deleted it and repeated the exercise, reentering the config info.
• ‘Continue Installation?’ yes….   warnings again about deprecated functions, and then no output due to headers already sent….. groundhog day…..
• Created php.ini for am directory and set warnings off.  refreshed, went through the whole exercise again, including redeleting and re-entering config.
• Gave up on the setup url, went back to homepage… could not login . Also get a spelling mistake causing an undefined constant error in the config.inc.php
• Gathered I probably had not finished setup – went to their setup.php – found line 23 and commented it out.
  //error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);
• Was then able to complete setup (i think..), albeit with a bunch of messages.
• Logged in to admin screen – error message and blank
• Edited config.inc.php and config- dist and commented outchanged line 19 //error_reporting(E_ALL ^ (E_NOTICE | E_DEPRECATED)); to
  error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);

Whew – now we have the admin control panel, but we are not seeing all those many errors…..

Configure Amember

• Utilities > Setup / Configuration > Plugins > tick wordpress on.
• Got message Table ‘wp.users’ does not exist… well its not called that now is it? So…
• Utilities > Setup / Configuration > WordPress – Fill in fields.    You may need to save and then re-edit to get the roles to come up  – see instructions at the bottom of that page
• Copy plugins/protect/wordpress/ma-amember_widget.php  to the wordpress plugins directory

Configure rest of amember

• Add a product, add a free one for quick and easy testing. Note that to achieve integration with wordpress you must specify the wordpress role and/or level.  The user should then automatically get updated in wordpress.  If not, try rebuilding the database in amember.
• Configure free
• Configure Email etc
• Configure paypal, put in sandbox details etc

Configure wordpress in wordpress

• activate the widget plugin
• goto widgets, choose the widget area that you want the amember login to appear in
  • specify the amember url ie where amember has been installed
  • specify the signup page – this is the amember signup page. Eg: http://localhost/am/signup.php

The widget when you are not logged in

Some points to note:

• Login to amember via /where amember is/admin. This does not log you in as a user unlike wordpress.
• Can add admin users with different levels of access.  Unfortunately They still see all the menu options though, just are not allowed to do the actions.
• Register via the amember widget. this will create userid. Check whether you have set that  User signup must be confirmed or completed before wordpress user will be created!
• Check that the test user has not expired…

testing logins…

• add a product, link to a wordpress role (i used the roles that the free memberwing plugin setup) and/or level, define expiry period etc, landing page.  set it up as 0 cost initially
• register a new user for that product – yes – wordpress user created thank you
• login…. can login to amember no problems, but does not login to wordpress.  Can login to wordpress separately using newly registered user and the free memberwing protection works nicely on the defined roles but cannot get logins to work together… tried cookie  settings, didn’t seem to make a difference
• this made me question expiry….does not seem to integrate there either.

Think I am going to give up here…..

It’s looking too hard and I keep thinking of what I’d have to do still to  make the look and feel work from a user (website owner)  perspective – yes I could split up the admin area and probably add wordpress menu options for the admin framed areas, yes I could restyle etc.  Yes I could pay another nearly $700 for “the wordpress amemeber integration package” and maybe still not get what I think we need..

Going to start looking for plan B now while i wait to see if there is any feedback on issues logged…

Still to do

• Configure Cron
• Configure Global, Advanced, Email
• Enable payment system plugin & configure, test payment system
  Edit Emails
• Create any content folders and directories, chmod 777, Protect folders – .htaccess and figure out a way for wordpress to load some uploads into special folder (yes of course we can ftp, but we looking at non-skilled user perspective)
• Customise templates:

• signup,
• member
• login

• Turn off test mode and go live.

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