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 The content in this post is more than a year old and may no longer represent best practices.
Check any of the WordPress job boards and you’ll see requests for membership sites–from people who are expecting to pay, since they plan to make money. That must be why there are so many commercial membership plugins for WordPress, though you can do fairly well with the free S2 Member Framework, as long as you and your members are happy using PayPal.
Membership plugins assume that you want to restrict access to your content, and probably charge for that access. If you have a membership-based organization but aren’t providing a special section of the website for members, then you might be able to use a different plugin, or just a PayPal subscription button, or Gravity Forms to handle your membership registration form. Anca Mosoiu talked a bit about the plugin Participants Database for those who want to keep track of their offline members inside WordPress.
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