For the list of members with their status etc if the list is not too big (better tools required if list gets really large -  will hopefully be coming from the “Cambridge new media” crowd in later versions):

• Logon to admin >go to Your members > Members and subscriptions > Member Management
• see partial list
• Go down to  Number of Rows per page:
• Enter a large enough number and click reload
• see full list – select all, cut and paste into excel, or calc

Users who have subscribed to email notifications

For full list, including those who have subscribed to post notifications using Subscribe2.  Note since this is a quick easy signup – to encourage the user, the only info available is email address.  Any one NOT on the full list is only a  “please notify me” member, not paid

• Go to Tools > Subscribers
• Filter if you want to cut the list down, else select all.
• Top right hand side – select “save emails to csv” file

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Resources:

• getting-started-guide
• support forum

Installing

• Got the email promptly, downloaded, unzipped, relocated and activated.  No problem
• entered email address to activate, wandered around and did a bit of setup
• Admin screen could use a bit of css to improve presentation – maybe float those list options next to each other
• decided to try adding a download since I was intending to sequester our files.  Discovered that this version has a minor annoyance about the upload folder.  It automatically created the upload folder that it wanted, however I had to manually change the permissions using my ftp tool   to get the upload of a download (!) to work.
• Some of the documentation looks like it needs an update – there is inconsistent terminology which is a bit confusing – I guess “registration fields” are “custom user fields”?
• Code changes required to cope if you have used the wordpress constants to relocate your wordpress admin and content folders.

Live

It is now live over at http://intuitiveweek.com.

• Currently membership is managed on a “partially protected content” basis – ie the shortcodes are  used to block out parts of the post, leaving a teaser.
• This site also offers a private podcast, using the private RSS token that YM offers.  A further code fix was required in this version to remove the mp3 enclosure if  there were mp3′s in the post if the public feed was used.  Ideally it should do this only if the mp3 is in the private section.  Hopefully the guys will include this in the next version.

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We were also using Your members and the Subscribe2 plugin, so I needed to see how they would handle the setup.

I wanted to get the users pre-loaded without emails flying out all over the place, and then advise me that they could come to the site and request a “lost” password or reactivate.

PhpMyAdmin

PhpmyAdmin has tools to import from a csv file.   Simply ensure that the column names are the same.

Life is not that simple however.

wp_users table was easy enough.  You need a minimum of

1. user_login
2. user_email

and can leave the rest blank or put a dummy password in.

Ideally you probably want at a bit more. I entered into  the phpmyadmin import tool this string:

user_login,user_nicename,user_email,user_registered,display_name

as well as obviously giving it a csv file with matching columns.  Remember to match the specification of delimiters and encapsulated strings.

Dealing with the passwords

You do not really have to!!   On login attempt, the user request ‘lost password’, get an activation email, click that  and get a new password.

That’s not all though…

However if they try to login with the new password, they get

“You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.“

This is because the user does not have a role in the wp_usermeta table.

The easy way:

If the numbers of subscribers allow you to, use the authors/users too, select all users, deselect admin or others, then click “Change role to” subscriber.  Save .

If you have problems when you are testing this process (as in you cannot get the new password email), check that you use the same browser to click on the activation link as when you requested the password.  I use firefox for my logged in admin user and IE for my subscriber tester, however since firefox is my default for my email package, it used that when ever I clicked on the activation link and wordpress must check and did not send me new password due to no match.  Took me a while to figure that one out!

The hard way:

Find the userids from the wp_user table (or guess/extrapolate) and add entries (perhaps using another csv upload!) . Note (leave umeta_id blank, wp will assign).

1. user_id
2. meta_key – yourtableprefix_capabilities
3. meta_value – a:1:{s:10:”subscriber”;b:1;} for subscribers, or see what your other subscribers have

you also need another set of rows for

1. user_id
2. meta_key – yourtableprefix_user_level
3. meta_value – 1 for subscribers

At that point, the user should now be able to login, with appropriate access to wp.

Other Plugins:

Subscribe2:

S2 (Subscribe2 ) data is blank (so no emails?).     Although it does have some bulk update tools, the subscribers do not show up initially.  More sets of user-meta rows required.

1. s2_subscribed – -1 (for all categories, else category list
2. s2_autosub – yes
3. s2_excerpt – post or excerpt
4. s2_format – text or html

Your Members:

If no data,  YM 1.4.5  treats them as free, with no expiry etc. YM will assign an RSS token when they navigate to the membership details screen. You can do more sets of rows in the user meta table to update.

manually

There are also bulk updates in the YM member managment area, so if volumes are not too low and you can “batch” the data, you can probably update these manually.

or via the db

Creating the ym_user data via the DB  may be trickier…..

1. ym_status – active or inactive
2. ym_user O:15:”YourMember_User”:8:{s:8:”duration”;s:2:”10″;s:13:”duration_type”;s:1:”y”;s:6:”amount”;i:0;s:8:”currency”;s:3:”USD”;s:13:”last_pay_date”;s:10:”2009-04-18″;s:11:”expire_date”;s:10:”2019-04-18″;s:12:”account_type”;s:4:”Free”;s:10:”status_str”;s:20:”Free Account Created”;}

Your members does also have a bulk update tool in the member management area, and Sean and Tim are apparently coming up with a migration tool, so check their website.

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• Members and subscriptions

  • Member management – paged list of members,
    • can filter and sort.  Would be more intuitive if sorting was achieved by links on column headings, rather than a reload.
    • can do bulk updates of selected users. The styling and java script make the action areas seem seaprate, yet they actually relate to the user list.  Need to try to do this  in a way that is similar to wordpress user list
  • Members Roles – subscription options and account types
    • specify types of plans, and the account types they relate to.

• Content Management and Access Control

  • Access Settings
    • Registration control - say whether account type can be selected at registration
    • Specify Full or partial protection.  In Full protection, enable public access otherwise all will be directed to login screen.
  • Download Manager – to add cloaked (protected) download files – does not work at moment with podcast due to cloaking
  • Page excludes – exclude any thank you/cancelled etc pages
  • Pay Per post management – who has sold/bought and gifting a post
  • Users Custom fields (Custom Profile fields, eg: terms, country, address)

• Payment Gateways

  • Free – required for pay per post. Set duration and logo. How does this duration related to free account type
  • Trial – duration set in subscription options,  Set logo here.
  • Paypal – set paypal email address and return url’s (thank you and cancel – default  options are provided.).  Set logo, test/live mode, or subscription type.

• Other Settings

  • General Settings – Main, name, email, login redirect
  • Setup (Setup Posts) – Link Posts and Pages to Account Types – aimed at conversion of existing site?
  • Messages – text’s that the user sees
  • Modules (Payment Modules) – this is where you activate the payment gateways.  Also has access/link to setup all your paypal configuration. Remember to change the Paypal sandbox and user name

Reorganisation of Admin Area

Ideally I’d like to separate initial configuration (more skilled) and ongoing management (could be someone else):

Ongoing Management:

• Member management – paged list of members
• Pay Per post management – who has sold/bought and gifting a post
• Download Manager – addition of new protected material

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• 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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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

Memberwing

• 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!

Wishlist Member

• 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.com

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?:

membershipacademy

• 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…..

membership-plugin.com

• 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 ??

wpmembersite.com

• 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

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