Membership site setup

Dive in. Make it easy for members to join your organization. Use our system fields and create custom fields as needed. Jump in. Our tips can help you smoothly import your member data from your prior system. Whether you are hosting online or offline events, we can help you collect RSVPs, charge for tickets and see a live view of everyone who is registered.

Setting up your categories is the first step in creating events. Do you need a separate calendar page for some events? Do you want to give your members permission to post events too? We can help you accomplish those things. With a paid MembershipWorks plan, you can accept payments for event registration. You can also offer member and non-member ticket pricing. Learn how. The Forms Carts Donations feature adds more functionality to your website; allow your members and website visitors to purchase items and interact with your organization more meaningfully.

Make donations easy; you can set up fixed amount items and open-ended donation amounts. Sell items such as hats, T-shirts, advertising and sponsorships on a shopping page. Ask members and nonmembers about their opinions with a simple survey. Conduct a vote for your slate of officers using an online voting form. Allow your members to sign up for committees online.

Encourage members and prospects to reach out to you via your contact form. Your customers never have to leave your site to use MembershipWorks features. Build pages to house your sign-up form, directory, member login, calendar and other functions. Ghost gives you the option to create a monthly and a yearly subscription, so you can build a sustainable, recurring revenue business model.

When you enter your pricing and currency in Ghost, plans are automatically created in Stripe for you. If you decide to change your pricing, simply change the values in Ghost and the new prices will sync in Stripe. Tip: Existing customers will remain at the same price they signed up at when you change your prices. This is a great way to experiment with pricing or offer early adopter discounts if you're just getting started.

Default post access is what all new posts will be set to by default when new posts are created for ease of use, you can still switch post access levels on a per-post basis. With Stripe connected and pricing plans in place, the next step is to customize Portal, which makes it easy for visitors to sign up and support your work. From choosing a plan to email notifications, right down to account management — Portal handles the full membership experience for your subscribers. Portal can be added to any Ghost site, using any theme, without needing to write code or edit your theme templates.

When you update Portal from the UI, changes save to your live Portal right away. Select which plans are available to visitors who want to signup. Use any combination of plans to suit your business: free-only, paid-only or a combination of the two. Leave all plans unchecked for an invite-only site, where your visitors have to contact you directly for access.

Create a Portal that matches your company brand or publication style. You'll see the Portal screens update in real-time as you make changes. Remember to hit the save button when you're finished editing. It's possible to hide the default Portal button and access specific Portal screens via URLs or data attributes in your theme. Read more about Portal links in the developer docs. If you're using Ghost Pro email configuration is handled for you so long as you have enabled members on your site.

This setting allows you to create a segment of people who you send emails to most often, using any combination of post access level, free or paid status, and member labels. Your support email address is used to send member login emails and is also the public email address that you can share on your site, so your members can contact you for help with their accounts. Once users submit that form, they become members, getting access to the private content. The great thing about setting up a WordPress membership site via form submission is it frees you from manually sending emails containing passwords to users.

After form submission, your customer will receive either a quick access link QAL or a password letting them access membership content directly.

More than that, you have full control over your QALs, i. We assume that you have already created a form on your site. In case you use Gravity Form, you can deliver quick access links to your registers after submission via a Confirmation message or Notification email.

The following screenshot demonstrates how a custom message looks when your customer receives it. Now, they can click on the quick access link to view the protected premium content or use the password sent to unlock your WordPress membership content.

Group Password Protection will give you a helping hand! In particular, you can gather the content based on the access levels of users. Each group here stands for each membership level. You need to protect them from illegally downloading and sharing. The same scenario goes to the membership sites built by membership and password protection plugins as well. Your members can still share the download links with others. You, as the content creator, will gain no benefits or revenue from your hard work as you deserve.

Aware of this issue, we recommend you use PDA Gold to protect all of your media files. The plugin seamlessly works with PPWP Pro and other membership plugins to safeguard unlimited files, videos, audio, etc.

For the detailed guide, check out our tutorial on how to protect downloadable files in WordPress membership sites.