Building a complete membership site can be a real challenge. Toolset plugins help you do this easily and without PHP programming. Toolset even offers a complete prototype for starting your project.
See how it works for yourself
A membership site needs to provide many specific features. These include membership plans, restricted access to certain content, a means of registering users, and more.
To help you build membership projects, we recently released a complete Membership reference site. Please review the online demo or register a free Discover WP account and create a site for yourself. Toolset users can also install this site in their own environment and use it as a basis for their project.
To learn how to build a membership project, read our guide about creating membership sites using Toolset.
Or you can watch the video:
Features of the Membership Reference Site
Let us examine the features of our membership reference site.
Three types of membership plans
Membership sites have different types of membership plans. Each plan has access to specific types of content. Our Membership Site has three plans: one free and two premium.
Restricting posts of a certain type to members only
To restrict content to members only, it is best to separate that content into custom post types. For example, «Advanced Tutorials» could be restricted to registered users. Visitors cannot access these tutorials.
However, only «VIP» members can access the site’s «Webinars» section.
Restricting Content but Showing a «Teaser» on Archive Pages
To convert visitors to members, you can show «teaser» text instead of the full articles. Toolset allows you to create a custom archive page easily and display only the «teaser» content.
To learn how to do this, visit our tutorial regarding custom layouts for archives with restricted access.
Restricting access to some parts of the articles
You can hide specific parts of pages that are otherwise viewable by everyone.
Register users
Registering new users is a crucial part of a membership site. Our Membership Reference site features a user registration form that is connected to a WooCommerce Checkout page.
Charging Fees for Premium Accounts
This site includes a working prototype of a WooCommerce checkout process for «buying» membership plans. This prototype allows you to see how the process works and adapt it to your own project.
Making Your Membership Site Multilingual
You may notice that the membership reference site does not feature WPML. We may add this feature in the future. If a sufficient number of our users send us feedback suggesting that we add WPML to the site, we will implement it as soon as possible.
Because Toolset is our own product, it is fully compatible with WPML. This means you can easily turn this membership site into a multilingual one.
Feedback?
We hope this reference site proves to be a valuable tool for you. Please send us comments to let us know how it is working for you. In addition, tell us whether there is anything you would like to see added or improved. Let us know and we will get back to you.