The New & Improved Way to Turn Wordpress 2.7 into a Membership Community
Last March I wrote an article for WPDesigner (then subsequently republished it here) detailing the ways you could use a base install of Wordpress (then on version 2.3) into a membership directory with the help of just a few plugins. This worked, and still works beautifully for me over at my Pittsburgh Designers community site. But since writing this article new plugins have become available with the unveiling of the completely revised WP core update 2.7.
Replacing the Old Plugins
In my previous installations I used only three plugins: Dealsway’s User Manager and IWG’s Role Manager. This time around I wanted more customization and more control over what was being shown to the users. I ended up trying every plugin I could find that might have a remote chance in helping me accomplish my end objective. The following is my final list of plugins and customization tricks that I used in creating my latest membership project: BUYAPITTSBURGHHOME.com.
Profile Setup & Customization
While this is arguably the most important part of the membership site, I really wasn’t looking for a replacement to the User Manager plguin I was currently using. I had no problem with it, and it was a fairly easy to use plugin. On my membership tutorial, someone suggested looking at the Register Plus plugin. I decided to give it a shot, and I am glad I did. While I still needed to hack the /wp-admin/users-edit.php file to get my profile fields in the order I wanted them, I was happy with the noticeable improvements this plugin had over User Manager.
There are many things that Register Plus does well, but I chose it for the fact that I may need some of it’s features down the road, not particularly right now. I did like the fact that it gave you the ability to replace some of the outgoing WP themed emails surrounding the registration events, but after some testing I decided that it wasn’t the best plugin to handle this. New User Email Setup did the trick, and made the outgoing emails completely customizable.
I also added the old and reliable User Photo plugin. I had installed this on many client WP directory sites, but this is the first time I used it myself. There are a ton of options, but once you find the right combination - it’s a set it and forget it type of plugin.
Plugins I Use Plugins I Tested (but came up short)Admin Interface & Branding
One of the most important things I wanted more control over this time was to have a more customizable admin section where the members enter their profile data. There are a slew of plugins that add various levels of branding the admin dashboard, but only one went to the extent I needed.
Customize your Community (or CYC) was created by one of the true Wordpress gurus, Joost De Valk. It is extremely easy to use, and works like a charm when paired with the WP Hide Dashboard plugin (without it, members can type in /wp-admin/index.php and get to your dashboard).
I ended up hacking the CYC plugin so I could order my custom profile fields the way I wanted them displayed, but this was just my preference, and not required at all for it to work perfectly.
Plugin I Use Plugins I Tested (but came up short)Displaying Authors
As soon as I found Custom Author Permalink, I knew it was a godsend. Anyone wanting to get rid of the awful /author/ permalink structure needs this plugin. The great thing about it is that you can activate the plugin just to set the permalink, then deactivate immediately afterward - it doesn’t have to always be ‘on’ to work.
In my old setup, I needed to ‘approve’ a member by creating a new post on their behalf in order for their profile page to become visible. Now, the plugin Show authors without posts takes care of this for me. One problem is that now that every profile is visible, I had to reverse engineer a little PHP code to check to see if certain profile fields met certain criteria, otherwise I would just do a redirect back to the site’s homepage.
Plugins I Use Plugins I Tested (but came up short)Wordpress Security
To be honest, I didn’t have much in the way of security back when I created my original membership directory. Now, since there are a slew of great security related plugins available, I definitely made this a high priority.
My biggest problem was that I had a ton of spam registrations - a problem that seems to plague many Wordpress site administrators. While you can never stop a registration strictly because someone wants to look around, I found that WP-reCAPTCHA took care of all the spam registrations once and for all. Although the Register Plus plugin gave me the ability to implement CAPTCHA, this plugin gave me more customizable options.
Another problem of mine was that although I relied on Role Manager (and I still do) to restrict a member’s movement within the admin panel, I realized that there could be plenty going on in the background that I had no clue about. In came Audit Trail - a plugin that tracks every movement and attempt of a logged in user. The only thing I would change is for it to do is to track what was changed when a member updated his or her profile. Audit Trail already tries to capture this, but when you start adding custom profile fields it loses its functionality.
As I mentioned above, I still use IWG’s Role Manager plugin to restrict which actions can be done by logged in members. I teamed this with the already mentioned WP Hide Dashboard plugin, and my users can now only see what I want them to see.
I also installed WP Security Scan just to see what I could find - which at the time was nothing, but I figure this will end up finding its way onto my regular checklist.
Plugins I Use Plugins I Tested (but came up short)Miscellaneous & Vital Plugins
Statistics: For this project, I wanted to see how far I could integrate a statistics package into the Wordpress backend. I tried out StatPress Reloaded and Wordpress Reports, but in the end kept with my reliable stalwarts Statcounter and Google Analytics. I think the next plugin I want to test is for Mint.
Database Backups: Backups are essential to preserving an online community in case of a disaster and should be scheduled to run on at least a weekly basis. For me, I originally started using WP-DBManager, but after finding that it never really took a complete backup (presumably because of my horrible host) I switched to WordPress Database Backup and never looked back.
SEO: I am not sure how useful sitemaps are to the search engines, but I figured creating one wouldn’t hurt. I only tried Google XML Sitemaps, and stuck with it because looked to be the best right from the start. I also chose to install Platinum SEO Pack for the flexibility it gave when creating the page titles.
Development: WP-phpMyAdmin and WP Easy Uploader were essential for me when I was doing development work on the site. With these two, my time in development was greatly reduced.
Other Usefuls: Here is the rest of the list I used when creating my community: WP Super Cache, Weasel’s HTML Bios, Article Templates, WP125, WP-Components
Very Promising: These are quality plugins that I just don’t have a use for yet. They are ones I want to keep in my back pocket just incase I ever have a need for them: SimplePie Plugin for WordPress, RegLevel, Wordpress Newsletter, Member Access
