Create a Simple Tutorial Site with the WPMU DEV Membership Plugin

Today I’m going to do a special tutorial for all of you WPMU DEV Members that takes advantage of our great Membership plugin. What we’re going to do is create a membership system for a tutorial site, a la the lovely Net Tuts.  WPMU DEV’s Membership Plugin is huge, and today we’re only going to scratch the surface of it, but if you’re new to the plugin and to creating membership sites this should be a great way to get you started.

1. Install WordPress

(yes, you should have already done that…… I hope)

2. Install the Membership Plugin

I’m not going to go into details of how to do that here but please do follow the instructions at WPMU DEV.

3. Plan!

This is the most important stage of creating your membership site. Bad planning will lead to a badly run site and that’s what we want to avoid most of all.

So let’s stop, and think for a moment about what we want out membership site to do.

I want a tutorial site where all visitors will have access to tutorials, but there will be special tutorials, content and downloads for members. I want, for example, my paying subscribers to be able to download PSDs of all of the tutorial files. But I want to keep regular visitors away from that stuff.

This is so easy to achieve with our Membership Plugin that you’ll wonder why you haven’t done it before. I was thinking about creating some sort of members-only club but then my husband reminded me that no one ever wanted to be in a club with me :( Sad story… right?

ANYWAY, let’s charge those people for some content!

I want two subscription types:

1. Subscribers – people who have signed up to the site. They can have profiles and post comments
2. Members – paying customers. The kind that we like :D

4. Decide who gets access to what

Yes, more planning. I want to split up my content in the following ways:

• Standard Tutorials – Available to Everyone
• Commenting – Available to Subscribers and Members
• Videos – Available to Members
• Advanced Tutorials – Available to Members
• Downloads – Available to Members

5. Set up Access

There are quite a lot of different types of content there and I’m going to use a few different methods in order to control access to them.

a) Tutorials

The easiest way to protect this type of content is using categories.

Go to Posts > Categories

I’m going to create just two tutorial categories for now: Tutorials and Advanced Tutorials:

b) Videos

I’m going to use shortcodes to protect my video content. This is because I want to embed them within the tutorial posts. Members will be able to view them while non-members will get a message telling them that they can’t have access to the content.

Go to Membership > Edit Options

Scroll down to “Shortcode protected content.”

Add your shortcode. You can add as many as you want, just make sure they are each on a new line.

Make sure you set the dropdown to “shortcodes are protected by default.”

c) Downloads

As well as restricting some content, I want to restrict downloads. The Membership plugin does this by masking the download URL.

Go to Membership > Edit Options

Scroll down to Downloads/Media Protection

You should set it up as follows:

Of course, this is a very simple set up. You can have as many types of download groups as you want. Assign different types of content to different memberships. Just make sure you get it all straight in the planning stage or you could get confused.

6. Create Your Levels

Despite having two subscription types, I’m going to have four levels. Why? Because we’re going to give our subscribers stuff and then take it away – a gentle encouragement to get them to sign up. My levels are going to be as follows:

1. Visitors – regular visitors who get to look at free stuff
2. Subscribers – can comment
3. Subscriber Plus – when people sign up to be subscribers we’ll give them a week’s access to some of the member content. Then it’ll be automatically taken away.
4. Members – paying members who get a whole lot of stuff.

To set up your levels go to Membership > Levels

Click “Add new” on the right hand side:

When you set up your levels you can have positive or negative rules. Positive rules are things that members are allowed access to, negative rules they aren’t.

To add a rule just drag and drop from the right hand column into the correct place – just like you do with widgets!

Visitors

I want visitors to just have access to posts marked “Tutorials” so I drag the Categories box over and select Tutorials. Like so:

Then scroll down to the bottom and select “Add.”

Subscriber

Subscribers are going to have the same access as visitors but they are allowed to comment on posts. Add the Tutorial category like you did with “Visitors” and then scroll down to Associated Roles. This is a great new feature that came with the latest update to the Membership Plugin. You now have the ability to associate membership levels with with WordPress roles.

Select like so:

NB: In order for this to work you need to ensure that under Settings > Discussion you have “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” selected:

Subscriber Plus

Anyone who signs up as a subscriber will be assigned this level first. They’ll have it for a week before dropping down to the standard subscriber level. Let’s give these guys access to the videos. As well as dragging over “categories” we’ll need to drag over shortcodes and ensure that [video] is selected:

As you can see from the number of shortcodes you can stick pretty much anything in there. Podcasts, video, chat screens, forms, anything!

Don’t forget to select “Subscriber” for your associated role.

Members

Members get loads of stuff. We want to give them access to Tutorials, Advanced Tutorials, Downloads and Videos. You could also give them access to special pages, back end functionality, even give them their own dropdown menu!!! You can use the Membership plugin to give your members an entirely different website should you wish.

Drag over the Categories, Downloads and Shortcodes sections and make the correct settings.

As before, we’ll use the “Subscriber” associated role but you could make your members into contributors and have a special members’ blog.

Time to activate those levels:

6.5 Create Your Strangers

By default when you enable the Membership Plugin people who visit your website are “strangers” and have no access to any of your content. We want to turn our strangers into visitors. Go to Membership > Edit Options

You’ll find “Stranger Settings” right at the top.

From the “Use Membership Level” select “Visitors.”

Now anyone who visits your site will have access to content.

7. Create Your Subscriptions

We have four levels but we only need two types of subscription (remember – our visitor level has already been allocated to “strangers.”)

a) Subscriber

The Membership Plugin lets you create subscriptions in which your members move through various stages. We’re going to set up a very simple version of this but you can add as many levels as you want. For now we’re going to set our subscribers to start off at “Subscriber Plus” and then drop to “Subscriber” after a week. This will give them access to my beautifully shot tutorial videos for one week before I cruelly tear them away from them. MWAH!

First of all choose your subscription name and give it a nice description. This will be shown on your sign-up page:

Now choose your first level – this should be at the top. You can set it up for as long as you want:

• Finite – set period of time
• Indefinite – stuck there forever
• Serial – for a set period, then renewed

Drag Subscriber Plus to the top membership level, select “Finite” and set days to “7”:

After the 7 days are up we want the level to drop to “Subscriber” so we drag the “Subscribers” level underneath. We’ll set this to indefinite:

b) Members

Like before, give your subscription level a name and a catchy description:

Drag over the Members level. We want to give Members access for 1 year. And we want it to automatically renew after the end of that year.

If you want a more complex system you could have 1 month, 3 month, 6 month and 1 year subscriptions. Perhaps you could give people signing up for a year a discount over the 1 month subscribers.

As we did with our levels we need to activate our subscriptions. You do this in the same way – click underneath the subscription name.

We also need to make our subscriptions public:

There are two more things that you need to do before adding your content:

8. Protected Content Page

This is the message you want to appear whenever someone tries to get access to content that they aren’t able to. They’ll be redirected to the No Access Page. Create the page. Add your message and then select it from the dropdown:

9. Subscription Form

You’ll need a place where your subscribers can actually sign up for your site. This is easy. All you’ve got to do is to create a new page with the shortcode [subscriptionform] in it. Again, this is where you should be telling people why they should sign up for your awesome website.

It should look something like this:

10. Activate Your Payment Gateways

Go to Membership > Edit Gateways and choose whichever payment gateway you wish to use. New with Membership 2.0 is the ability to add single payment gateways. This is set up with PayPal but a developer will be able to change that to any payment service you like.

You can use this screen to theme the buttons however you like – get creative!

11. Enable Your Protection

Last, but not at all least, you need to enable your membership plugin. Click on your “Membership” Menu and click “Enable it”:

12. Create Your Awesome Tutorials

Now we’re ready to go. I’m going to create a tutorial and give my different subscribers different access.

Create a post as usual and add content:

Make sure you have the correct category selected:

You can add protected media by uploading your media and then selecting the protected download group:

And that’s it! You have created your very own simple tutorial site! Go play, expand and have fun!

Let us know how you get on in the comments or send us links to your own subscription sites. We love to see how people are implementing our plugins. WPMU DEV Members always surprise us with how imaginative they can be!

Not a WPMU DEV Member? You can become a member or purchase the Membership Plugin for only $39! And don’t forget – we have a Lite version of the plugin in the WordPress Plugin Repository.