Amazing WordPress Plugins – Part 2

Creating a Membership Site

Back in February, I wrote about two amazing WordPress plugins that made implementing a rotating flash header easy to implement. In this post, I want to talk about more nifty WordPress plugins that helped me implement a membership area on the Web site. This area is used by the  condominium association to communicate with the owners of the properties, providing updates to documents, minutes to board meetings and information on social events.

Once again, I needed to find some WordPress plugins that helped me implement some type of protected area on the site. Through my search, I found two very powerful but easy to use plugins – Member Access and MemberWing Membership site plugin.

Based on the features needed for the site, I ended up selecting the simpler of the plugins, Member Access. This plugin allows you to select what pages or posts on the site need a password to access. You can set the default as open to all and selectively protect the different pages until the member signs into their subscriber account. Once the member signs in, all the pages are accessible to them. This is just what I needed for this site.

Another membership plugin I found was the MemberWing Membership site plugin. And although I didn’t select it for my client’s site, I’ve saved that one for future use for me and a few of my clients. If you need to create a member’s area where you want to charge for content, Memberwing is what you want. It is very easy to set up and use, gives you four levels of access, users can register themselves, put in a credit card number and gain access to the content without your intervention. So check these membership plugins out.

Simplifying the User Experience

I also wanted to make it simple to manage the community of owners so I implemented another plugin called Register Plus, which allows members to register themselves while enabling me to customize the registration page and ask for information from the person wanting to register. Register Plus only supports WordPress 2.5+ but we’re at 2.7, so no worries there. It allows you to add a custom logo, password field, invitation codes, disclaimer, captcha validation, email validation, user moderation, profile fields and other features that help you create a user community on WordPress. We set it up so that the accounts need to be approved by the management company, but this has cut down on the administrative needs of the site. As owners sell their properties, the new owners can register and the administrator can remove the accounts for those who are no longer owners. Before, I had to create user names and passwords for each of the owners and change them when properties were sold.

All was well and fine when I was testing the site, but when actual users were starting to register themselves, I needed two more plugins to remove the last two challenges and simplify things for users (and for me). Peter’s Case Insensitive Login removes the case sensitivity for those logging into the site. I’ve had this issue with many of my clients thinking “debra” and “Debra” are the same and email me when they get an invalid user login. I most likely will add this to all my client’s sites so they no longer have this problem.

The Peter’s Login Redirect enables me to send the users to the member’s home page of the site when they log in rather than the WordPress dashboard based on their roles, which for the owners is “subscriber”. This very useful plugin removes the confusion for the user and puts them at the area on the site where they belong.

I absolutely love the flexibility and power of WordPress as you can tell, and these plugins made something that was once project for a very skilled developer very easy to implement. My thanks to these developers who have contributed to this community.