Things change rapidly in the WordPress world. The content in this post is more than a year old and may no longer represent best practices.
Membership Plugins
- S2Member (Free and paid. Very popular. Integrates with bbPress and BuddyPress. Has an API. If you want to build membership sites as part of your business, you should get to know this.)
- WishList Member (One of the more popular solutions, and fairly intuitive to set up. Has an API. Prospects are likely to ask for it. Anca warns about the quality of its code, however.)
- Digital Access Pass (Integrates with vBulletin forums, should you be mad enough to use them. Also acts as a shopping cart and autoresponder.)
- WP eMember
- Membership (Free and paid versions from WPMU Dev)
- MemberMouse (Your $97/month includes “strategic support & advice to best utilize the MemberMouse platform to maximize your profits.” Integrates with Lime Light CRM.)
- WP-Member
- WP-Members™ (Free. Claims to be the first membership plugin built for WordPress.)
- MemberWing X (Infinite levels of membership, just in case you need them.)
- MagicMembers
- Easy Member Pro
- aMember Pro (Not a WordPress plugin but a tool that integrates with WordPress. Popular enough that it’s worth getting familiar with if you want to build membership sites for clients.)
- iMember 360 (Only for use with Infusionsoft CRM. Relies on shortcodes. Doesn’t have an API. Slows down site performance. Costs $370/year.)
- Paid Memberships Pro
- Premise (A Copyblogger product, originally developed for creating landing pages, now with membership included. Not completely intuitive to set up. Has vBulletin integration but doesn’t mention bbPress or BuddyPress. Lifetime license for use on unlimited sites.)
More Membership Links
- Comparison of Magic Members, WishList, and WP Member
- WinkPress: The Best WordPress Membership Plugin Comparison table of S2, WishList, and Digital Access Pass, with brief reviews of WP eMember, Magic Members, Paid Memberships Pro, Membership, Memberwing, Your Members, WP-Member, and MemberMouse.
- 14 Options for Managing Membership Websites. Includes some non-WordPress options and hosted services.
- S2 Member Tutorial from WinkPress. This covers the S2 side in detail, but not the PayPal side. Make sure you allow time to set up your PayPal account for IPN, etc.
- WinkPress guide to choosing a membership plugin. What to look for and the possible features.
Other Topics
Anca mentioned Participants Database as a tool for managing a large database of “offline” members. Imports from and exports to CSV. Creates a new table in your WP database to store all its field values.
We also discussed the versatility of Gravity Forms. Anca demonstrated the way it uses conditionals to show new form fields based on which items the user has selected above. If you wanted to create an online registration form for your organization, this would be a great tool to use.
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