How to create a member directory on your MemberPress site

Create a member directory on your MemberPress site

MemberPress is one of my go-to plugins for easily protecting and charging for access to your content. I appreciate the fact that they stay focused on this core goal and don’t overload it with extraneous features. So it does not have a member directory feature built-in, but by using an additional free plugin you can add this capability.

In this use-case the requirements of the directory are simple: a front-end listing of site members, that other users can browse.

When people register for your MemberPress offerings, they are added to the existing user system within WordPress.  That means that any plugin which taps into that to display WordPress users should work fine with MemberPress. You don’t have to look for anything that is MemberPress-specific.

There are several fully-featured and fairly complex directory plugins available on the WordPress repo, but they are generally aimed at being all-in-one solutions for creating and monetizing the directory. They aren’t really designed to be used in conjunction with an existing membership site.

There are fewer plugins that take a simpler approach, and even fewer that do a good job.

Read More

WordPress Image Positioning, Spacing & Alignment – Common Problems and Fixes

problems with images in WordPress - alignment, spacing, positiong

Last Updated on May 16, 2022. Ah images.

They cause so much grief in the WordPress editor don’t they? They just don’t seem to do what you expect of them. Unfortunately the WordPress editor is not a drag n’ drop interface which is how people generally expect it to work.

With the release of WordPress 5.0, the content editing experience has been revamped with the “Gutenberg” block editor. So it’s time to revamp this post. Gutenberg is not completely drag n’ drop, but it is a more visual way of creating content. Some parts of it make your life a lot easier, but not all issues are resolved. 

If you haven’t yet upgraded to WordPress 5+, the Classic Editor section of this post is for you. 

Read More

Using MemberPress for WordPress Membership Sites

In the first post of this mini-series we looked at the basic lingo you have to understand to get going with MemberPress. Here are a couple more tweaks you shouldn’t neglect when setting up your membership site.

Don’t leave visitors stranded

When first setting up your membership site, you’ll likely put a lot of care and attention into your registration pages, realizing that they will do the heavy lifting of converting visitors. But don’t forget to think about how people are actually going to end up on them. You’ll probably have links in your navigation and other obvious places, but you also need to think about what happens when someone stumbles across a blog post on your site with some protected content on it – what do you do with them and how do you get them into the sign-up process?

Read More

Show Custom Text on a Password Protected WordPress Page/Post

how to show custom text on a password protected page

It’s easy to password protect an entire page or post in WordPress. But what if you would like to show part of the content on the page?

I did look for a plugin solution for this at first. I thought it would be easy to find a plugin that gave you a shortcode to wrap around content you wanted to keep protected. I was wrong (unless you want to utilize user roles, but I didn’t want people to have to log in). I came across Content Protector, but found it really unreliable.

But there’s a pretty easy solution if you’re OK with a little code. For this solution you will need:

  • A child theme (because we’re going to be editing template files)
  • An understanding of the WordPress template hierarchy
  • The confidence to edit some PHP code

If this all sounds a bit much for you, you may want to check out my post on Going Beyond WordPress Basics, to build your confidence.

Read More

Getting Started With MemberPress

Getting Started with MemberPress - a membership plugin for WordPress

There are many ways to password-protect content in WordPress. Basic password-protection is built-in and there are other free plugins to expand upon that. But if you want to generate revenue from protected content, you’ll need a fully-featured membership plugin. There are many to choose from and I can’t say I’ve tried them all, but of the ones I have tried, I really like MemberPress. It has a lot of features and capabilities, but it’s also pretty easy to get up and running with. That said, learning a new system will always present some hurdles. Here are a few basic concepts I needed to get my head around to get going with MemberPress. Hopefully this will be helpful for you, too.

Read More