Multiple Membership Content Revisited

To clarify –

I wanted a FREE membership to show up, with a logon/register button, for the membership page.

Then I wanted a PAID membership to show up, with a logon/register button, further down the page, which would have content only available to PAID members.

The shortcode system is very poor and only showing ONE login/register button, with ALL the membership levels, which defeats the whole object.

This very simple configuration should be available on Paid Memberships Pro, surely?

More info – tried logging on as a FREE member, then the free membership content started showing.

But – the stuff within shortcodes just disappeared meaning that no-one would even realise it was there.

How on earth does this shortcode system work and more importantly – can it be trusted?

Hi @steveraven,

Thank you for using Paid Memberships Pro.

With regards to your membership levels of 1 month, 6 months and 12 months – I assume these are setup as individual memberships? Your shortcode will need to be used for each billing type for your second membership level for example [membership level='2,3,4'] ... this will be content for 1, 6 and 12 month memberships only. [/membership] (Please change the level to match the ID’s of each membership level you would like to display the content for).

Secondly, the notice for non-members will need a bit of customization if you want to show an upgrade button for a specific level as often restricted content can belong to multiple membership levels making it target a particular level fairly difficult (out of the box).

Here is documentation to achieve a more advanced customization for the message for non-members: https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/customizing-the-message-for-non-members-on-membership-protected-content/

I hope this helps.

Not really, no – as the content in the Advanced Settings fields will still be invisible to non-logged in members no matter what you put in there – and I’m not really wanting to shell out nearly $300 to get an advanced code snippet.

Also another problem I found – the Pay By Check option keeps on stripping out all of the html code. How can this issue be resolved?

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by steveraven.

Again to clarify:

I’d have no problem in trashing the free membership option, provided that the paid options would then show. As it is, the shortcode option for free membership is wiping out any paid options meaning that no paid option is visible.

Secondly – I assume that putting this paid option would allow for full blog posts (minus the premium content to be added for paid members) if using a shortcode?

If so, is there any reason that I should add new categories for PMP use if I’m using shortcodes to hide the content?

After a little further testing:

Deleted the FREE membership option as mentioned above, and just put all the PAID levels in and intended using shortcodes.

Decided to persevere with the ‘Pay By Check’ option and subscribed to a level two membership for ￡10 per month.

No payment was made (obviously) to see what happened, guessing that I’d need to authorise that the new member (me) had paid.

Lo and behold, all the restrictions had disappeared and I was able to view ALL the content without paying, no authorisation needed, all content visible now for free to anyone that realised this huge loophole existed!

What on earth is happening with this plugin?

Thanks for the feedback @steveraven, here is the link to the snippet – https://gist.github.com/strangerstudios/13f16bfa23da9caa3baf#file-my_pmpro_non_member_text_filter-php

All of our snippets are available on Github should you not wish to pay for a premium membership (Please note that the premium account gives you access to over 60+ add-ons, premium support and automatic updates for up to 5 websites and advanced guides and tips.)

There are quite a few issues in this thread and I will try and address them as efficiently as possible –

1. Regarding the shortcodes, if you have a category or post/page that requires memberships this will take preference. What you should do, if you want to offer multiple sections to show to certain memberships is remove this category restriction and make this post open to the public and then restrict content using the shortcodes instead. Does this make sense? Please let me know if it doesn’t.

2. Regarding the Pay By Check option, users should be set to pending until you process their order and then only gain access to restricted content. This may be a site specific issue and we would need to troubleshoot it further for you. You may have a look at our PMPro Approvals add on which will allow additional protection against this and require an admin to approve any user that signs up ( this does not link to which payment gateway is used but linked to the particular membership level).

This way you can only approve members once the payment has been reflected, for more information on the PMPro Approvals add on – https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/add-ons/approval-process-membership/

I’m really sorry for the inconvenience caused, I am going to be testing the Pay By Check functionality on my local environment to try and recreate the issue. If it’s a known bug, we will push this out in our next release of Paid Memberships Pro to resolve the issue.

I hope this helps and answers your questions. Thank you for your patience.

My apologies for the multiple posts, to touch back on this question –

More info – tried logging on as a FREE member, then the free membership content started showing.

But – the stuff within shortcodes just disappeared meaning that no-one would even realise it was there.

How on earth does this shortcode system work and more importantly – can it be trusted?

This is the correct functionality of the shortcode to simply hide the content without showing the message for non-logged in members or non-members, however as a work-around you may use the following shortcode in conjunction with your restricted member shortcode –

[membership level="0"]
	Hey this content block will show for non members and you may show a 'requires a membership level ID of 1 to view the content, sign up here' message.
[/membership]

[membership level="1"]
	This is content restricted for members that only have a membership ID of 1 and won't be displayed to non-members.
[/membership]

The content inside [membership level="0"] may be copied from your Advanced Settings messages or you may show your own unique content to non-members. This won’t automatically show the non-members message but whatever you put in between the shortcode.

The message for non-members and logged-in non-members will show on posts/pages or categories by default, that have been restricted through either the membership level or the ‘require membership’ setting found on each post/page.

I hope this clears things up.

For more information regarding how shortcodes work, please view our documentation here – https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/documentation/content-controls/with-shortcodes/ (this requires a FREE membership account or higher to gain access).

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by Andrew Lima.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by Andrew Lima.

Right, so what you’re saying, is that when a new member comes along and joins up, they still shouldn’t have access to the website until approved by myself, yes?

So ok, I’ll go along with that – but what happens when it’s time for them to join up for a second month of payments – or six months – or a year?

Either way I’m going to check this out right now with a new member and see what happens.

Getting an error message:

Javascript error found – please contact the webmaster.

Seeing as I’m the webmaster and I’m pretty sure that there are no javascript errors, I must presume that PMP is bolloxed.

The Approvals add on is used for the initial signup, thereafter the user will be approved for that level (even when renewing).

Do you have a link to your checkout page so I may look into this JavaScript error for you?

Not really, no – all the membership levels are on test mode at the moment, save for those brief moments like above where I’m seeing if they work on a live site.

If I’m going to be forced to spend nearly $300 dollars for the approvals add on – which has not been proven to work yet on my website, I think it’s better that I looked elsewhere.

You may get any of our add ons on Github if you would like to test this before deciding to purchase a membership.

No it’s ok.

Love the look and feel of the plugin (what works on it, that is) but this last announcement that I need to shell out nearly $300 to allow users to logon and get approved manually has placed it out of my price bracket.

Thanks anyway!

We are working on a solution for the Pay By Check add on and will be included in a future release.

Really sorry for the inconvenience caused.