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.
WordPress
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.
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.
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.
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.
How to Create a Simple Custom Events Plugin
My client wants to display on his site information about trade shows at which his company will be exhibiting. I know there are lots of event plugins out there, but most of the ones I know about would be overkill for our needs. So, I created a must-use custom Events plugin for this client. One of the requirements was to show both current and past events and to segregate them on the main events “landing” page.
Why SiteGround Hosting?
I currently recommend SiteGround hosting for WordPress Web projects whose requirements match what SiteGround offers.
If you’re thinking about using me for your WordPress Web project, I will — at some point early on — ask whether you’re open to using (or moving your existing site to) SiteGround.
You may wonder why, and you should. I offer my reasons in this blog post.
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.