YourMember Review: A Wordpress Membership Plugin

Lately I’ve had my eye on Wordpress in order to fulfill my needs for a membership website. I originally wanted a Joomla Membership site plugin but couldn’t find any decent ones that didn’t involve messing around with ridiculous amounts of code. After all my searches, I kept coming back to YourMember by Cambridge New Media Services. This is my review after installing it on a client’s website.

Teaser Text for the Search Engines

I could very easily have used DLGuard to build a membership site, but alas, I’m greedy. You see, I want the membership site itself to serve as an SEO magnet. I want my ‘member posts’ to have teaser text that the search engines will pick up. This way my posts serve 2 purposes: they offer new content to members and improve my sites search engine exposure.DLGuard unfortunately only blocks an entire page.

To expand, let’s say I was posting a video on creating a Wordpress Membership Site . I want the teaser to explain what’s inside the video…and then I want the video itself to be hidden. Google will love the SEO juice and I benefit with each added video I add to the collection.

YourMember does exactly this. It uses a set of [private] [/private] tags to block off private, member content. Instead of seeing the video, they see a prompt to sign up. If you’re a Free member trying to view paid content, it prompts you to Upgrade (you need to customize this yourself in the “Messages” section. In that section, you can precisely control exactly what they see using some tags. You can add images and formatting via HTML.

Membership Roles and Lead Capturing with Autoresponders

The next thing I was looking for was flexibility. I wanted to offer various memberships such as Free , 1 Month, 6 Month and 1 Year. The Free was for the sole purpose of collecting leads. YourMember has an area to drop in Javascript that can automatically add user names/emails to Aweber or other 3rd party scripts. Thing is, there’s no javascript available as of yet to accomplish this with GetResponse, so I see myself contracting a quick javascript expert on oDesk to write up the code.

The remaining membership levels are just gravy. YourMember accomodated everything. You can add as many levels as you desire.

Members Can Upgrade Themselves Automatically

My next concern was getting Free members upgraded to Silver or Gold status. The plugin adds a Widget to Wordpress that you simply activate and -tada- Members get a “Member Profile” area where they can upgrade to Silver or Gold Status. You can also add a link to the Upgrade area when they’re logged in and trying to view Silver or Gold content.

Paypal Cancellations

YourMember let’s users cancel their memberships in the Wordpress Dashboard via a Paypal button. Don’t worry, they won’t see your actual dashboard. Only a simplified version with just their details. Furthermore, YourMember also respects the remaining terms on the membership. So if I buy a 1 month membership on the 1st and cancel on the 15th, YourMember will allow access through the end of the month. They did pay, right?

What I Didn’t Like

One of the few things I didn’t like was the fact that Javascript code isn’t included yet for Aweber or GetResponse. I need to investigate that further. Adding that is icing on the cake in my opinion.

Also, there’s a 2-step process for signing up members. First they need to submit a username/email and subscription choice. Wordpress dispatches an email with the password. Then they use the username/password to login and complete the Paypal signup. You can see a live example at Joomla Online Training. http://www.joomlamovies.com/join

Finally, I would like to see some form of “mass mail” to members. But there’s tons of free Mass Mail plugins out there to take care of that.

Hey, it could be worse, right? (Like the current market for Joomla Membership Modules)

Conclusion

This Wordpress Membership Plugin is getting 5 stars in my book. The fact you can have a membership site up and running within 1 hour is amazing. And the flexibility with the Member Roles is inspiring. I highly recommend it and plan on using it for my Joomla Video Tutorial website.

-Jesus