For the recently launched membership website of the Southeastern Bluegrass Association, one of the requirements was a member directory comprised of member profile pages created and maintained by the members themselves. My initial approach was to consider using one of the third-party directory plugins I’ve used for other projects (GeoDirectory, Ultimate Member, or Directories Pro). However, I ran into some challenges making one of those directory plugins play nicely with MemberPress. So, I ended up creating my own custom directory, using WordPress’ user metadata.
Techniques
Short How-To articles, similar to Case Studies but on a smaller scale.
10 Tips for Using Basecamp Like a Pro
Basecamp is an online project management/project collaboration tool I use with many clients — the primary audience for this article. You won’t find a comprehensive how-to guide on Basecamp here. Instead, I offer an overview of Basecamp’s structure and a set of “best practices” in the form of guidelines and tips for making Basecamp your niche.
How (and Why) to Partially Protect Content on your Membership Site
The recently launched membership website for the Southeastern Bluegrass Association — powered by WordPress and MemberPress — allows only logged-in members to access some content, completely hiding (protecting) that content from unauthorized visitors. But we’re also using MemberPress to partially hide content. In other words, while logged-in members can access such content (say, a page or a blog post) in its entirety, unauthorized visitors can access a little bit of it — with the hope of enticing people to join.
Customize User Roles & Capabilities in WordPress: How (and Why)
Out of the box, WordPress offers a gatekeeping system — controlling which users can perform which actions— based on a default set of user roles and capabilities. In this article, I’ll explain the limitations of those default roles and capabilities and how you can (and why you should) modify them to better meet your specific needs. (Spoiler alert: Giving users too much “power” can lead to problems.)
Probably the most common case of giving users more power than they should have is the practice of conferring the role of “Administrator” to users who don’t need and shouldn’t have all the capabilities associated with that role.
Use Case for Custom Post Type: “In The News”
Many websites include an “In The News” section — content related to articles, videos, podcasts, etc., that other publishers have published about them. It might be called “News”, “Press”, “Media” or something else. In this post, I explain how and why I converted a blog-based “In The News” section to a custom post type and why this is a good use case for custom post types.
Avoid Direct Styling; Use CSS Instead
In this article I urge people to avoid the use of direct styling and instead rely on CSS for defining how the elements of a page or post should appear. I explain the downsides of direct styling and the advantages of CSS. Although, CSS is a huge topic, you don’t have to be an expert in CSS to use it in some basic and helpful ways.
Blog Tags: What They Are (and What They’re Not)
The categories and tags you use to describe your blog posts are not about search engine optimization. Their purpose is to make it easier for the people who are already on your Web site to navigate around and find content they’re interested in. When you’re tagging your blogs posts, you’re not publishing a thesaurus or creating a search engine ad campaign — you’re creating signposts.
Use Custom Lesson Icons for MemberPress Courses
I’m currently working on a Web site that offers online courses. I’m using the MemberPress Membership Plugin to restrict course content to registered members, and I’m using MemberPress’ Courses LMS addon for developing the course curriculums. MemberPress Courses does many things very well out of the box. This article describes a small but nagging problem I encountered and how I solved it.
How to Override MemberPress Template Files
Since MemberPress version 1.1.7, developers can override MemberPress template files (as well as the template files for MemberPress addons). I have written this article as a supplement to the excellent article in MemberPress’ official documentation so as to attempt to clarify one particular issue. Read on for more.
How To Add Custom Contextual Help Content To The WordPress Dashboard
In this article I explain how to add custom contextual help content to the WordPress dashboard.
If you’re a WordPress developer, you can make your clients more self-sufficient and effective by adding custom contextual help content. And that can make you more valuable to your clients.
Even if you’re not a WordPress developer, this article may be of interest.