The latest milestone in my (yikes) quarter century long relationship with the Southeastern Bluegrass Association (SEBA) was the development of their new WordPress-based membership website, which launched in July of this year. The three primary goals of the new website were (a) to make site maintenance as quick and easy as possible for the volunteers who keep the organization running; (b) to restrict access to premium content to logged-in members of the organization and (c) to foster and serve as a vehicle for the community aspect of the organization. Using WordPress as the platform, MemberPress as the membership engine, and several custom-built custom post types, we accomplished these goals.
MemberPress
How to Create a Custom MemberPress Course Progress Page
This post is inspired by a question that was posed in Facebook MemberPress Unofficial User Group:
Is there a way to see all of the users’ course progress in one place? I know I can access each user and see their progress that way. I was just hoping that there might be an easier way to see all of the members at once. Does anyone have any ideas on how to do this? Thanks in advance!
This is exactly what I implemented in one of my WordPress/MemberPress websites that has three courses using the MemberPress Courses addon. In my case, I wanted to offer two views of course progress: one grouped by User; the other grouped by Course.
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.
Create a Custom Shortcode to Display a MemberPress Membership Price ANYWHERE on Your Website
Today, as I prepared to change the price of a membership on one of my MemberPress membership sites, I knew that there are several places on the site where the price of the membership was hard-coded. (For example, I’m, displaying a custom pricing table that doesn’t utilize MemberPress Groups Price Box. I also have a callout on the home page which displays the price of this membership — also hard-coded.)
A membership price shortcode would eliminate the need to manually update all those places. However, although MemberPress has lots of shortcodes for content restriction, it doesn’t have one for displaying the price of a membership.
So I created one.
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.