How to let a user access vendor products instead of individualised products?
One of our recent clients wanted to set a user to be able to access their products by the vendor after they subscribe. In this blog, we offer a solution feature to your WordPress website.
Membership plugins are a perfect solution to this requirement. While there are many membership plugins available, the one you choose for your WordPress website depends on your requirement, budget and your knowledge of these plugins. Here, we help you choose the plugin that is up to your needs.
What are membership plugins?
Membership plugins allow you to build a membership site with WordPress. They allow you to create memberships and then provide these members access to content on your site. But in a wide range of such plugins available, choosing the right one is crucial for your business.
Some of the available plugins allow you to sell subscriptions on a single level while others have advanced features.
Membership plugins are used widely to allow only limited users to access the content on WordPress websites. They are generally used for:
- Steady Income resource: Website owners use membership plugins to limit their valuable content downloads etc to only paid users. In this way, they are able to have a steady income resource when visitors pay for their content long-term.
- Collecting data from visitors: You may also use membership plugins to get email data from your visitors which helps to grow your email list and drive sales. It’s a win-win situation for both visitors and the website owner as visitors can access the valuable content while the website owner can attract more users into their email list.
- Automation: If you have valuable content on your website for the visitors, a membership site is a perfect solution for you as it helps you deliver more value and generate more sales in return via its automated process.
- It also helps you build trust in your industry that you are an expert in your field having content that is valuable enough to get a membership for.
Some of the most common websites that use memberships are the following:
- E-learning websites having the content of courses, PDFs etc.
- Service-oriented memberships for consulting and coaching
- Online community with live chats, articles and resources limited to the members
- Product memberships to send physical or digital products to members
- Content Memberships for a fixed amount of time
Usage of memberships plugins is not limited to these websites as the use of the plugins depend on the criteria mentioned below.
To choose a membership plugin that matches your needs, you should focus on the following factors:
- Ease
- Compatibility
- Features
It is a user roles and capabilities oriented plugin giving you powerful features. It also allows setting permissions to allow or restrict the content for users with a UI having ease of use and compatibility with WordPress.
This plugin offers the following features:
- Role Editor
- Multiple User Roles
- Explicitly Deny Capabilities
- Clone Roles
- Content Permissions / Restricted Content
- Shortcodes
- Widgets
- Private Site
- Plugin Integration with WordPress
To use this plugin, assuming that you have installed WordPress, go to the WordPress dashboard -> Plugins -> Add New section and find Members – Membership & User Role Editor Plugin as shown in figure (a). Once you find the plugin, click on the Install Now button.
Fig a. Installing the plugin
After installing the plugin, we need to activate it by clicking on the Activate button as shown in figure (b).
Fig b. Activating the plugin
Once we have installed the plugin, we need to go to the Members menu as shown in figure (c).
Fig c. Members menu
To use this plugin, one needs to understand the concept of users, roles and their capabilities in WordPress. Here’s a short description:
To use this plugin, one needs to understand the concept of users, roles and their capabilities in WordPress. Here’s a short description:
Users:
When any visitor on your site registers, they become a user. In WordPress, these users are assigned a specific role which defines their capabilities.
Roles:
Users are usually grouped via roles which allow or restrict them from certain capabilities. These roles are:
- Administrator
- Author
- Contributor
- Customer
- Editor
- Subscriber
- User
Note that these roles are not hierarchical which means that a subscriber can have more capabilities than an administrator.
Capabilities:
Capabilities are a meaningful factor of roles which decide what a specific role can or cannot do. The best part of this plugin is that it has an ease of use and does not confuse you with complex and diverse features.
It is recommended to enable the Role Manager capabilities from the Members -> Settings -> General section as shown in figure (d).
Fig d. Settings of the plugin
It allows you to edit or add new roles and edit the default capabilities to custom ones with its powerful roles management system. It also lets you assign more than one role to any user as shown in figure (e) and its content permission feature adds an additional meta box. This meta box gives you the ability to set which roles can view the content of the page or post. You can restrict the content to specific roles via this feature.
Fig e. Settings of the user
All in all, this plugin is a perfect solution with limited but effective capabilities to build your next membership site.
It is a user profile and membership plugin for WordPress with an ability to allow users to sign up to become members of your website. If you want to create an advanced online community with user profiles, this plugin is a perfect solution.
Features of this plugin are:
- Front-end user profiles
- Front-end user registration
- Front-end user login
- Custom form fields
- Conditional logic for form fields
- Drag and drop form builder
- User account page
- Custom user roles
- Member directories
- User emails
- Content restriction
- Conditional nav menus
- Show author posts & comments on user profiles
- Developer friendly with dozens of actions and filters
The best part of this plugin is beautifully developed Members profiles as shown in fig(f).
Fig f. Members Profiles
The plugin also offers many effective extensions as of figure (g) which you can add as per your need.
Fig g. Extensions of Ultimate Member Plugin
To use this plugin to build our membership WordPress website, we need to install and activate it from the WordPress dashboard Plugins -> Add New section.
When we install this plugin, it will install six default pages required for the plugin to work. These six pages are:
- Register
- Login
- User
- Account
- Members
- Logout
From its settings section, we can customise this plugin. Ultimate Member -> Settings -> General -> Pages tab allows assigning the page as shown in figure (h).
Fig h. Pages tab Settings
We also make sure that each of these pages is published and a single page is not repeated. These pages must also contain the relevant shortcodes. Shortcodes for User Profile, Login and Registration forms can be found at wp-admin -> Ultimate Member -> Forms page as shown in figure (i).
Fig i. Shortcodes of the forms
Shortcode of the Member Directories can be found at wp-admin -> Ultimate Member -> member directory page as shown in figure (j).
Fig j. Shortcodes Member Directories
The shortcode for the account and password reset forms are:
[ultimatemember_account]
[ultimatemember_password]
respectively. We can also create a registration form via wp-admin -> Ultimate Member -> Forms page and then clicking on Add New as shown in figure (k).
Fig k. Adding a new Form
After adding a new form, we give it a Title, Select Form Type as shown in figure (l) and add the fields and design using the form builder shown in figure (m).
Fig l. Selecting Form Type
Fig m. Form Builder
Paid Membership plugins:
You might want to consider some of the paid memberships plugins with their advanced features for your requirements. Here we present you a complete guide on these plugins that you can consider:
- aMemberPro
- LearnDash
- Teachable
- s2Member
- WooCommerce Memberships
- Restrict Content Pro
- Paid Memberships Pro
Our Recommendations
If you want a free solution for your WordPress Membership sites, Members and Ultimate Member are the options that we recommend. For showcasing the Profiles of the members in a very user friendly and with stunning UX, Ultimate Member is your free go-to plugin.