Options for Membership web sites
By · CommentsFollowing are a summary of options there are for developing a membership site using wordpress. Many of these are actually very new – domains registered in late 2008.
This is good and bad -> good -> will probably be up to date with latest web possibilities and bad in that it may not have had time to get robust.
At this point I have not used all these products, however I will be putting a new of membership sites live in the coming months, and intend to update this post with our experiences. These notes represent our initial evaluation based on freely available information.
Requirements:
- a plugin type solution, could be one that requires integration, but no hosted solutions (want to minimise third parties)
- membership levels (free, or trial, and paid levels)
- may require rss or podcast secure access
- at least paypal gateway
- want wordpress blog posts to convert to be emailed out
Your Members by New Media ( first choice so far)
- Paypal payment gateway, and Clickbank
- Single One off Payments(long Term or Pay per post)
- Subscription
- Free and Trial Membership, multiple roles
- Post/Page Delay – useful for course content delivery
- Protect parts of posts using Private Short Code, or
- Complete post protection
- Secure RSS with Tokens – allows full content feeds
- $50 for single license
- $200 for developer license
- domain registered since May 2008, newish
- a very human face, you can see who the guys are (Tim Nash and Sean Barton)
- I like the style of the website – augers well for the style of the code
- also has a affiliate program – vetted
- Support
- manual
– could use an update, but not that hard to get going - forum – they guys are very responsive
- they do have some screencasts
- manual
- has a free version, without the gradual content. Otherwise
- $80 (automated membership, else manual effort needed, Also more gateways.)
- $100 including the gradual content
- $200 unlimited domains
- Teaser markers not that intuitive for non-tech clients – I’d like a more user friendly way – will have to think about it…
- Forum says “coming soon… “
- Uses paypal IPN (works with paypal standard), authorize.net, 2chcekout, Trialpay etc
- implements google’s First Click Free – is this a good idea or not?
- has a separate gradual content plugin ($80 for single, $150 unlimited)
- has a not completly setup affiliate program – missing the name in the email title!
- domain created July 2008
- No humanness, although I believe Gleb is the man – contrast to the shopp plugin where Jon is quite visible and forum active.
- I tend to be influenced by the style of the site as a guide to the “panache” (or cleverness of design) with which a plugin is developed. Gleb – vamp up the style and get the forum going!!!
- Functionality wise it looks good -I have to give the free version a go and if the quality looks good, then give the premium a go.
- has an affiliate program so may be more reviews out there than would be otherwise – common sense and pinch of salt required!
- Unlimited Membership Levels, Free, Trial, or Paid
- Sequential Content Delivery
- Subscription Length Control
- Secure Content, partial content display
- Secure RSS feed key
- Supports PayPal, Clickbank, Google Checkout, and 1ShoppingCart.
- has lots of support videos
- no demo, but videos essentially deliver that
- Online “ticket” support M-F 9-5, nopublic forum – no visibility of general queries, no forum
- Has a customer area for when one has purchased
- $97 – One domain, updates and 3 months support (30 day refund offer?)
- $297 – multi-site-own personal domains (ei: not a developer license), updates plus training material
- domain registered since April 2008, newish
- no visibility of frequency of updates
- appears to rely on paypal, or quick pay pro to do any recurring subscriptions – have to set the products up in those system.
Amember control panel
- Has a plugin to integrate with wordpress, however the admin area has a very different look and feel from wordpress.
- $179.95 to $200, plus extra for cms plugin
- For incremental contemt (I guess this is the course type iodea, one may want amemberincremental
- forum support, accessible to public, and posts say support is great
- It is not completely clear to me at this stage, but it appears that the products provided in this joint venture between ithemes cory miller and David Moskowitz are in addition to amember: http://www.membershipacademy.com/wordpress-amember.php
- domain registered since 2003, more established
- I don’t like the look and feel of the control panel – what does it look like in wordpress?
- has some possibly useful demographic reporting
- It was first choice – see how far I got here
WP Member – advanced membership Plugin
- Dedicated wordpress plugin – may make for a more consistent admin interface
- Various levels of support, plus you can buy on-demand support
- Uses Paypal IPN
- Variety of membership types, levels
- Subscription control, teaser pages
- File download and link protection
- Requires IonCube Php extension
- Yearly license fees, (1 – $34.99, 5-$51.99 and 10-$84.99)so this means ongoing costs for your client. This differs from the others in that they often simply restrict the upgrades that you have access to.
- domain registered since July 2008, so relatively new
wp-membership.com by Synergy Software
- has a demo where you can logon as admin, not enough pre-populated data – would take a bit of effort to test out.
- a forum which at time of writing was rather empty
- offers paypal and authorize.net
- similar to suma in having consistent look and feel but not that sophisticated in functionality yet, but probably has all the basic needs.
- Single instance, plus authorize.net ($30 + $10)
- offers a range of pricing for developers from $142.36 for 5 to approx $900 for 60+
- domain registered since October 2008, so one of the newest
- They need to provide more info to attract me.
- One has to enter/specify the posts that are restricted, or the categories. We need also the shortcode idea with a “teaser” – that should be easy to add in though.
- users don”t seem to be integrated with wordpress users – why not, also has own pages. From a design point of view, I’d rather worth with wordpress’s design than alongside it.
Suma Membership and Subscription Management
- has a demo site
- $199, one time, not transferrable, no developer arrangement, so must buy in client’s name to be legally correct
- Uses Paypal express as payment method
- Says it requires you to have a PayPal Website Payments Pro accoun, so that means $30 a month at least. Not sure why it says this, since the Express checkout can be free of monthly costs.
- Support – appears to be via an email address only – no forum, no humanness
- Can download an evaluation copy
- Very much a part of wordpress, so consistent look and feel – looks like a clean, simple setup (nice for non tech clients), but probably limited to exactly what its says – paid subscription and membership – no drip feed, no course content
- domain registered since September 2008, so relatively new
Not a Plugin, but may be helpful to some – also indicates complexity of integration?:
- Actually more of a facilitation service where David Moskowitz helps you get going with a membership system. I found it amusing that it is essentially a meta membership site – a membership site about having a membership site.
- It also has a useful review of membership site software, although many of these are separate from wordpress or are hosted versions.
- Demo site: http://www.wordpressamember.com
Avoid the following
Don’t worry – there is a no follow on the links…..
- Avoid..My feeling is not good about this one:
- absolutely no “human face”, hidden domain name ownership
- no forum, just a support form
- Bullshit? I quote “Membership Plugin is the most sought after and most used wordpress membership / subscription plugin in the world” – I only found a mention it after several days.. .
- Manual page text links don’t work
- annoying animations
- Site is hard to read green/blue text on green/blue background ??
- what the ? See above (except there is a name attached)
- it’s a one pager and seemingly unattended
- ! video which clearly shows old wordpress and there is not much else there – maybe it does something, who knows
- support forum link is full of crap
Don’t blame 2.9!
A site was hacked. This was only detected because he had a funny admin screen so decided to do auto upgrade to 2.9 (possibly without backup!). This appeared to cause his plugins to dissappear including the one that protected his content! This may help others, as initial googling did not find direct answers.
Imperatives for any site!
Ability to recreate your site – this means
- keeping clean copies of any premium themes and plugins, as well as a database backup. The wordpress files and free plugins can be re downloaded
- most good hosts will do a daily backup – know how to call on them if you have to – at most you may lose one day of posts or registrations. Worst case you export the possibly hacked DB and files in case you need to carefully extract any updates before they restore the older version of your site!
Ability to detect a problem
- See some notes here http://webdesign.anmari.com/check-if-youve-been-hacked/
Symptoms:
- “funny admin screen” under 2.8.4
- on upgrade to 2.9 – plugins appeared “lost” – invalid header message on upgrade. Maybe 2.9 detecting the bad code?
Upon investigation
Wordpress files
- At top wp level, found BAD file: shermie_helsa.php – with eval base 64 code.
- Config file was hacked too
- did spot checks and hold thumbs, seems clean – worry is DB?
- At top wp level, found BAD file: shermie_helsa.php – with eval base 64 code – Deleted it
- Config file was hacked too
Themes
- All top level files of themes hacked too – probably the script just adds itself to all the files.
- Tried to clean up – very badly hacked though – everywhere – looks like bad javascript too!
- Saved BAD themes to a somehackedfiles at top level via godaddy – DO NOT click on or RUN from BROWSER. Delete if you no longer need them.
- Loaded a clean default theme.
- Got clean cutline from http://cutline.tubetorial.com/cutline-3-column-theme-now-available/
- copied over tailored images – edited header.php to use your images – hope that was the only custom change made!
Plugins
- same as themes – hack must run through all such files
- copied to the hacked files
- downloaded new versions
- copied my version of ym – I don’t have yminder locally yet – do you have a clean copy – else download later
- ADDED:
- login lockdown (helps prevent bruteforce hacking into your system)
- wp-db-backup (no backups were available)
Wordpress DB
- browsed through the options (apparently some hacks hide there – did not see any thing obviously wrong there….)
Other useful posts:
- http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/old-wordpress-versions-under-attack/
- http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/old-wordpress-versions-under-attack/
- wordpress has two minor changes:
- For hasty configurers who do not configure the nice names for the list headings, the earlier version would fail on attempting to configure a list without first configuring nicenames. 1.4.5 will check and use default nicenames.
- For versions of wordpress < 2.8 (and note still greater than or equal to 2.7) the rss feed for updates such as this one about the plugin would fail as it uses function fetch_feed which is new in 2.8. Alternate logic has been provided.
Breadcrumbs with increasing indentation
By · CommentsA vertical use of the Breadcrumb widget
Indented Breadcrumbs
A query was received from Kim for http://metakosmia.dk, asking how to indent successive levels of the breadcrumb widget links. This was not possible in version 1.1, so version 1.2 has been released with css classes added for each breadcrumb indicating it’s depth in the menu. This css class allows you then to assign your own styling to the levels.
Example CSS:
#amr-breadcrumb .lvl2{ padding-left: 1em;}
#amr-breadcrumb .lvl3{ padding-left: 2em;}
#amr-breadcrumb .lvl4{ padding-left: 3em;}
HTML generated:
HTML generated
Unable to edit some wordpress users
By · CommentsFinally solved a nagging problem in my wordpress test system. I was unable to edit some test users, not all – some were okay .
Message received was:
Catchable fatal error: Object of class __PHP_Incomplete_Class could not be converted to string in C:\web\wp28\wp\wp-includes\formatting.php on line 405
I had previously worked through another problem with this 9640 patch. While it fixed another problem, I then started to get this one. Eventually I found this http://lists.automattic.com/pipermail/wp-trac/2009-July/053190.html, and it dawned on me,
Red dawn
A test system – plugins not fully uninstalled….Hmm… In testing amr-users, my user reporting plugin, I have had several plugins installed that create user data, not all of them active now. I dived into phpmyadmin, deleted any usermeta that related to plugins not in use, and viola – user editing problems fell away
Search for members or users
By · CommentsSearch for that member!
I have received a few requests for member search facilities – a “search for that member” tool. This may be a useful add-on to my amr users lists plugin. In thinking about it, it seems to me that there are a few possible approaches: Eg:
- Search for a particular member within a large community or subscription base
- admin – searching for a member, with “some” data – possibly part of name, or approximate date registered. A short term solution for a partial name search is to have a long “amr-users” list with relevant data displayed, and then click edit/find in your browser – this would then search all the text on the screen and jump to the possibilities.
- users – searching for similar users or members. This is possibly more of a filtering operating. They would probably need to be able to to be able to filter by some data that has been created by a user meta plugin like Register Plus or any of the membership plugins.For example – say class year and/or current location
- Filtering – allow a user or viewer to filter a list returning a sublist, possibly sorted by a dynamic criteria (similar to the point above)
Specifics required
Before working on such a plugin, it would be useful if people would describe in more detail their ideas of a member or user search tool and how they would like it to work. If you are interested in such a tool, please comment on this post.
