Comments on: Opinion: Why WordPress Should Never Be Used As Membership Management System

By: TheSpotter

TheSpotter — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 12:24:56 +0000

Alba,

Since you have limited skills my best recommendation would be Easy Member Pro membership script, I think it will fit your needs perfectly! Since you mentioned you have limited funds – I can offer you discount on it, if you choose to purchase it, as a JV partner and a friend I get the privilege to offer this to my readers: http://www.howtospoter.com/wp-......php?id=40 . If you are planning to also provide free content to people, you can add WordPress to membership system and if not already – I know Anthony has a plugin for integrating his script with WP

By: Alba

Alba — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 11:28:27 +0000

Hi, Just reading your comment on wordpress for membership , i am new to wordpress and I am not a programmer or have any experince building websites, I am finding my way around ,I am trying to build a small site which requires a membership and payment on two levels, level 1 is a single charge of £1 for a month and then a yearly subscription , having read your article i am not sure now how to do this now. Is there a payment system for this type of thing that is secure, I have limited funds at this time. Hope you can help. I was trying to use Joomla but I found this difficult and was recommended to WordPress. I really would appreciate your advice Alba.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 22:31:41 +0000

Thanks for this info, everyone’s told me to use wordpress for everything, and we’re even switching over to wordpress from our current cms at work. Nice to know that it is good tool and not a magical online heal-all.

By: TheSpotter

TheSpotter — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:22:51 +0000

Bryan,

First of all, I almost deleted your comment as it got int spam folder automatically. To answer your question – I use manual text insertion into theme file, I have described it in this post: http://www.howtospoter.com/web.....avoid-spam

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:58:27 +0000

Great post and I want to go off topic a bit so I understand if you will delete this comment. Like many readers I get a LOT of span and your comment plugin is exactly what I need; Some way of stating “Comment guidelines: No keywords in name, comments must contribute to the discussion, no links to inappropriate or offensive sites. ALL SPAM DELETED!”. Could you please point me in the right direction? Trying to find out what plugin to use/ how to do this. I’m sure other readers would appreciate the info too, it’s not easy to find the answer on Google.

By: TheSpotter

TheSpotter — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:28:06 +0000

Shennan,

There are exceptions!

1. Is an excellent script mentioned here: “DAP” – it works besides WP and doesn’t depend on its code- superb plugin as I have discovered myself
2. You are a technical person who can handle the complexity
3. You have someone on your team to deal with technical complexity

If any of the exceptions above fit your profile – WordPress can be used as membership site quite successfully. Although for a pure membership site I still think separate script might be simpler choice. I guess it depends on your needs.

By: Shennan T.

Shennan T. — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:18:24 +0000

A while back I was approached by a client about creating a membership-type website using wordpress. I told him I didn’t know how but that I would research it. I ended up explaining to him that I didn’t know how. I’m glad you pointed out the cons for this topic. Now if I’m ever asked, I can plain and simply tell the client “NO”, so I don’t have to deal with those hassles. Thanks for this informative article.

By: Amy

Amy — Mon, 17 May 2010 01:45:33 +0000

I love WordPress and use it all the time. Its hard to keep up with all the updates though. Its time well spent for a good quality product for the people who we serve though. I will keep using till something better comes out.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:05:54 +0000

The upgrade to get secure versus broken functionality is always a difficult problem. Upgrading WP is always a little bit scary.

To minimise the risk I always have a local version of my sites running that is identical to the live ones. That way I can do the upgrades to WP core and all plugins and check that everything still works. If something doesn’t then I can contact someone to hopefully get it sorted.

That still leaves me with a potential security problem if I don’t upgrade straight away. To be honest, you are going to have security issues with any website, regardless of whether it’s open or closed source.

If you ran a bespoke closed source application that you bought from a smaller company then you still have problems: They might not respond to security issues, they might not tell you about existing ones, you might not notice the problems until it’s too late.

At least with the WP model errors and security issues are flagged up quickly and fixed quickly. For me, this is better than relying on a closed-source product.

Unless you have your own development team working on your website then you are always going to have potential security problems that may have to wait some time for a fix.

By: June

June — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 02:00:13 +0000

It would be nice if you would reveal the host in question, both good and bad. It would help a lot of people make better informed choices.
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