With wordpress being more and more popular, the need to do more advanced things grows as well. Simple websites, simple blogs that become popular posting articles or doing something else want to expand their reach and add more features and functionality to websites.

A point that every website reach at a certain moment is to let user to register, to engage them to the website, and provide them with ability that is  not available to non-registered users.

In few words, you want to add membership functionality to your website. The process is complex and you won’t find too many good plugins to do that so far, and most of them are paid, but i found a great plugin that does all the work for me, and it is free. It is s2member.

S2member allows your visitors to register, to login, to be directed to a page where only registered users have access, and set restrictions for certain pages to not be visible for the public.

The best part of s2member is that you can accept payments for membership trough paypal and all the work is handled by the plugin. The payment gateway, storing members and Transaction numbers, everything is done by the plugin.

S2member

To setup s2member you have to do some simple things:

  • Customize registration/login pages ( add your logo, etc )
  • Set-up membership levels
  • Set-up registration/landing page
  • Set-up restricted pages
  • Set-up paypal

The setup is pretty much straightforward. What you have to do next is to set up your pages with content and test if it works. The plugin also have support for paypal sandbox, so you only have to check the “debug” status in s2member configuration and you can test if it works well with paypal.

The fun part

You will be amazed on how flexible you can be with s2member. You can set any type of payment you want: give any number of days free, monthly, weekly, daily subscriptions, one time payments. It also supports one time file download.

Basically you can do whatever you want.

Content available only for registered members

In s2member control panel you can set what pages to be available only for registered members. When you add a page of a post you can select the minimum level of membership required to see that page. You can set up to 5 levels of membership.

If you want that only certain content of a page to be visible and other parts of the page to be seen only by registered users than you can use wordpress short tags to prevent access.

Enjoy this free piece of art!