Information wants to be free

March 1, 2012 5:02 PM

A question about software that turns Wordpress into a paid-membership-only platform.

So a client, hoping to make money from website content, asked me to install a Wordpress commercial plugin his friend told him about, called Your Members. It turned out to be a very bad experience. This guy wanted the site not merely to charge $5/month but to offer all these alternative plans.

The software, while promising to do this kind of thing well, was not there yet. It misfired a lot and sent users to weird, broken pages. The support was rude and unhelpful. Now the client is frustrated and blaming me.

I was wondering if anyone had any experience with alternative plugin software for establishing a Wordpress paywall, or any ideas as to what I can tell this guy. I've heard good things about Gravity Forms, which promises membership support and handling of recurring PayPal payments. But I am afraid of being drawn into a major E-commerce engineering project, as opposed to a nice, simple bolt-on package that would do the job (maybe Shopp?) because I I want out of this nightmare. Should I just tell the guy to find a Drupal developer?

Any help much appreciated.

posted by steinsaltz to Technology (6 answers total)

ExpressionEngine has an excellent module named Membrr which does exactly this. We use EE a lot at work and it's really easy for anyone who knows WP to pick up.
posted by airways at 6:42 PM on March 1, 2012

Membership is the lite version of the commercial plugin of the same name. It's got multiple membership levels.

I've used it on smaller installs (a couple of member levels), and it worked pretty well.
posted by chrisfromthelc at 8:55 PM on March 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

It might also be that your client needs to re-evaluate his member levels. The simpler, the better. People are more likely to sign up if they're very clear on what they're getting.
posted by chrisfromthelc at 8:56 PM on March 1, 2012

I have never done what you want with Gravity forms, but they have lived up to their promises in other areas, have been open to ideas, and provided me with decent support. If you use regular forms in WP a lot, it's not a bad one to buy.

Least favorite thing is that the dev license enables you to use it on client sites but I don't hand out my dev key, so clients cannot access the gravity help forums. Unless I'm doing something wrong...
posted by maxwelton at 10:39 PM on March 1, 2012

I don't think Gravity Forms would be a good solution, as you're going to be cobbling together parts to do what you want. Membership has already done the hard work for you.
posted by chrisfromthelc at 12:08 AM on March 2, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks. I may take a look at Membership.
posted by steinsaltz at 10:58 AM on March 2, 2012