What Will I Learn

This post is the first in a series of tutorials on how to customize a membership website on WordPress using the free WP-Member plugin.

At the end of this series, you will be able to integrate certain features that makes a membership website using WordPress.

Specifically, this post will be covering

1. General WordPress settings for our Membership site

2. Specific plugin settings for our membership site under the WP-Member Options tab including

    - Content Customization
    - Other Miscellaneous Settings
    - Specific Page Customization
    - Choosing a Stylesheet
   

Requirements

• WordPress Installation

• WP-Member Plugin

• WordPress Installation

You should have a working WordPress installation to test run the activities of this tutorial.

To learn more about installing WordPress read this post.

• WP-Member WordPress Membership Plugin

WP-Member is a WordPress plugin that's specifically used to create and customize membership websites on WordPress.

The WordPress WP-Member plugin has features that allows us to build the following pages

• Login page which provides an interface for users to login
• Register page which provides an interface for users to register
• User profile page where users can edit their profile information e.t.c

Difficulty

Basic

Customizing the Site

To start with go to the link given in the requirements section above, download the plugin and install it on your existing WordPress website installation.

Activate the plugin to get it running and ready for customization.

1. Recommended Settings

Before using the WP-Member plugin on your website there are certain settings that are highly recommended to be added from the native WordPress Settings section.

• First, we are going to prevent users from logging in through the /wp-login page.

  Go to Settings > General, make sure the field that says Anyone can Register is unchecked.

• The other recommended setting is the Permalink which will set the link address to all the pages in such a way that they are optimized for SEO.

  To do that go to Settings > Permalinks , change the value to anything other than the default value Plain which appears as the first option on the page.

  

2. Specific Plugin Settings

Go to the main WP-Membersdashboard which is located at Settings > WP-Members area of the WordPress admin area.

This interface allows you to set values for settings native to the plugin.

There are five tabs in all on this interface, in this post we will only be dealing with the first tab which is the WP-Members Options.

The other tabs and other customization options will be treated in the subsequent posts.

WP-Members Options

There are four sections under this tab which are Content, Other Settings, Pages and Stylesheet.

In the Content section apply the following settings

• Content Blocking: This setting allows you to specify whether to block certain type of content on your website from unregistered members.

  Usually the given contents are Posts and Pages but if you have initially included a Custom Post Type on your site it will be included in the available options.

  For the sake of this tutorial we will be choosing to block all posts and pages.

• Show Excerpts: Here you can choose to display excerpts of posts and pages in place of the full content for every user that's not logged in.

  Here we'll choose to leave them unchecked.

• Show Login Form: Whenever a non-registered user tries to view premium content this setting allows us to specify whether to display the login form in place of the premium content.

  We'll leave the boxes checked.

• Show Registration Form: This is just like the setting directly above, it sets the registration form to be displayed alongside the login form whenever a non-registered user tries to view private content.

  Again we'll leave the boxes checked.

• Auto Excerpt: Through this setting we can define a custom excerpt for our premium posts and pages.

  Check both boxes to set auto excerpt for all posts and pages.

  You can also set the number of words that appear in the excerpt and add an additional read more link.

The next section is the Other Settings section, in here we'll apply the following settings.

• Notify Admin: By checking the box, you are setting up the admin to always receive an email for every newly registered user.

  Check the box.

• Moderate Registration: This setting will allow the admin to manually approve every new user registration before allowing them access to the site.

  Leave this field unchecked.

• Ignore Warning Messages: You can choose to stop receiving notifications and warning messages on your dashboard by checking this box.

  Check the box.

• Attribution: Checking this box will automatically include "powered by WP-Members" at the end of the registration form.

  Leave this field unchecked.

• Enable CAPTCHA: Here you can choose to include CAPTCHA verification in your registration form to prevent bot registrations.

  Leave this field at None.

In the Pages section we will specify the pages dedicated to user login, user registration and user profile either by choosing from the available list of pages or by providing a custom URL for those pages.

Before choosing a page for any these fields you must have created the page in the Pages section of your WordPress admin dashboard.

• Login: To indicate the page handling the login activity of the user.

• Register: This field will indicate the page handling the registration of new users.

• User Profile: This field is used to indicate the page where every user can visit in case they forget their password.

The last section for this tab is the Stylesheet which will be used to state the path to the CSS file used in styling the website.

The drop down contains a list of available stylesheets to use, you can pick anyone that works for you.

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You can check out other WordPress contributions from me on here.

1. How to Add Bitcoin as a Payment Option on a WordPress Website

2. How to Sell Digital Products on a WordPress Website using the Easy Digital Download Plugin

3. How to Add Background Videos for any Post or Page on WordPress

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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