Creating a Membership Site with WordPress

For the most part, the default settings in WordPress are sufficient to get started. There are a few settings, however, that should be changed before you start customizing the site.

One of the first settings you'll want to change is the Permalinks. Permalinks are permanent URLs to your post, pages, categories, and tags used for finding information on the site and is also used to link to the site. This makes user friendly and readable links and it helps in SEO.

You'll also want to set the date and time for the site to your local time. The default time is set to London England time but can easily be changed.

A theme is a separate set of files that works with the database and the core WordPress files to produce the layout and appearance of the site.

This video covers the installation of the S2Member Framework and the WP Show IDs plugin that we need for the creation of the membership site.

PayPal developer account is needed for testing PayPal payment transactions before going live. These transactions are tests only and no money is actually transferred.

Now that we've created a PayPal developer account and we have a PayPal sandbox site we can configure the PayPal Account Details. We'll be using PayPal as a way for customers to pay for access to the membership site.

IPN or Instant Payment Notification is a feature from PayPal that sends messages about payments directly from the PayPal website.

PDT or Payment Data Transfer is needed to receive notifications of successful payments and Auto-Return brings customers back to the website after payment.

Membership levels not only determine who gets access to site content they're also used for other elements of the site. They're used in the design for Membership Options page and they're used to customize the PayPal buttons.

The PayPal buttons are generate by S2Member using the information supplied in the form fields on the button generator screen. These are the button we'll be placing in the membership options page.

The PayPal buttons are generate by S2member using the information supplied in the form fields on the button generator screen. These are the button we'll be placing in the membership options page.

The registration screen, the log-in screen and the lost password screen by default have the S2Member logo installed. These screens can be branded and customized to match the design of the site.

Amazon Web Services or AWS provides a web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. This interface is simple enough that you can retrieve data using a URL, so it’s well-suited for basic web hosting tasks, like serving up media files.

Video content can be served to customers without using the Amazon AWS services. But for the best performance and reliability this configuration is efficient and videos can be streamed. And to make it easy this setup is configured automatically.

In this lesson we'll install the JW Player to be used with the AmazonS3 and CloudFront configuration. The Amazon S3 and CloudFront configurations and the JW Player and RTMP Protocol streaming allows videos to be played without the member being able to download the video itself. This is a nice protection for the videos. This configuration also has the ability to Stream/Seek media files.

Since we'll be allowing access to restricted files with Amazon S3 and CloudFront we'll need to set some Basic Download Restrictions. This is an important step since it enables the File Download functionality for S2member.

This is the first page a member will see after logging in, so this is a nice place for information about using the site and some helpful links. A Welcome page full of too much detail and fine print can be a distraction but at the very least this page should contain a welcome message and brief instructions about using the site.

Now that the parameters are set for the membership site the content can be protected.

The way you protect content will depend on your site focus.

Protected files for the membership site are added to the Amazon S3 bucket we created in a previous video. We configured S2Member to look in this Amazon S3 bucket for any protected files like media files, for instance. Now we'll add videos to this bucket and then place those videos in pages so they can be viewed by members.

We created a PayPal developer account and a PayPal sandbox site and we have the PayPal options configured, and the buttons are created using these test account settings. The site is ready to test. Now we need to create some buyer test accounts.

One thing that can be overlooked easily is making a backup of your site. It's one of those things that you don't know you need it until it's too late.