Great research, lots of work that is very well presented.

I would love to throw our hat into the ring too, if you will kindly permit.

I’m the founder/co-developer of http://DigitalAccessPass.com (DAP) – a Membership Plugin for WordPress. We’re quite frequently ranked among the top 3 when it comes to discussions about membership plugins for wordpress.

We’ve been around for just over 2 years, and have a very stable, extensive platform and we offer “FANATIC’nical support

Hope you will consider adding us to your amazing list.

If you wish, we can also make you an affiliate for our product. Just let us know.

Thanks!

Ravi Jayagopal
Founder & Co-Developer, DigitalAccessPass

I have stayed with YM because I know it now, it does what I need it to do, I bought a developers license etc. The latest version still required a bit of tweaking (some minor html validation errors – some things along those lines), but on the whole it works. Also generally the guys are very responsive. (And it’s a lot cheaper than some member packages!) . I have not worked with latest wishlist member.

Some comments in Your Members vs Wishlist (without using latest wishlist):
Wishlist seems to be a bigger group of people (last I looked about 8? ) , they put out more communications, training etc. Ym are now up to 3 people I think

The affiliate problem…. I think this is one of the dangers in using affiliates is that one may lose control over what and how one’s product is presented. There are people who live off affiliate programs and do not always really know the product they are advocating. That does not mean that the product is bad, just that they have not been ‘selective’ with their affiliates. (You could maybe let them know that feedback? – maybe they have some terms whereby they could disassociate, which they might do if they thought they were losing sales)

Re: RegisterPlus – it’s a pity – I had a look around and the persona skullbit or devbit seems to have disappeared… hope nothing bad happened. Maybe someone will have the time to pick it up where it left off. Should be some mechanism to check if really abandoned and then allow someone else to take it over.

Sorry to hear about register plus I liked the way it worked maybe I’ll look at it later

Yes Ym is running on this site. More comment later struggling with Internet access now … Cable tv etc down and backup Internet not happy either at moment

It’s a couple of days I have been looking for a WP plugin to add some membership handling to a site of mine. I do not actually think of payments handling but just adding custom fields to the WP registration form (my site shows machinery videos and I want to know the companies to which users belong, country and city where the companies are based etc) plus forcing users to log in to see the site content.
I gave a trial to RegisterPlus, the free plugin, but found some issues and from its forum I’ve got to know the plugin had been sort of abandoned by creators. Then I crossed Pie Register, introducing themselves as a fork of RegisterPlus, only to read in its forum it had same flaws as RP and had been abandoned as well.
I then started googling paid membership plugins and crossed WishList, Amember, Membergate etc. Discarded Membergate whose price ($4000) is out of my range I then tried to understand more about the rest of the crew. I noticed a bunch of review sites promoting WishList but they had rather a superficial style and appeared to be run by people mostly interested in drawing traffic to their own site and with not much of a clue about software. Then I found your honest article and reputable background to make me take a breath. Said that I have just two questions:
-is Your Members still your first choice?
-is this site of yours running Your Members?
Thanks and regards
Sandro

thanks for this. Since you posted this in March, has anything changed in your assessment of these products, their relative rankings, etc? Have you seen any new noteworthy membership solutions? Have you looked at BuddyPress?

Thanks!

Rob

With the number of people using YM, I’d be very surprised if there was bad code in the paypal link! The first time I installed it, I did experience several paypal related confusions, which turned out to be more paypal’s then YM.

- did you try logging it at the support forum eg: see : http://newmedias.co.uk/support/topic/the-link-you-have-used-to-enter-the-paypal-system-is-invalid-1
Looking at the YM support forums an invalid link message can occur for other reasons (eg: possibly a not fully verified paypal account).

Standard support is via the forum – those who have purchased developer package have access to a developer support email and response was pretty fast then.

I just downloaded a free Open Source plugin that looks like it will meet my needs (s2Member).