Membership site with protected forum

[nick1900]

Hi

I just wanted an opinion about the best way to go about this spec:

“Client wants a membership area on the main site with access to premium content and a forum.”

I’ve looked at a load of plugins WPeMember, Membership and they all sort of offer the same thing with different levels and access. But then some users suggest bbpress others Simplepress. This will not have a lot of members – perhaps up to 500 but I wanted to go for a combination that some other WP users have had a good experience with.
Thanks!

[Robin W]

In use bbpress for the forum, as it integrates well with my wp theme.

I then use Restrict-content plugin by pippin Wilkinson to set various pages and posts to members only.

So in my case
general public can view forums and public pages
The forums are restricted to those who register (can be manual or automatic – I use manual) and are the only ones who can contribute.
Members get both pages posts and forums

You can set up private forums as well, so the combination of bbpress and restrict content plugins work really well for me, and look like they’ll work for you.
I have about 600 users on this site

[nick1900]

thanks for the reply – I checked it out and it looks like the pro version is the one that will handle subscriptions with a payment gateway.

On the membership plugin I tested it allowed you to specify which menu items were visible so these only appeared when logged in – does the Restrict Content do the same?

[Robin W]

Yes restrict content works with the wp levels

no role for this site
subscriber
contributor
author
editor
admin

I simply set my users as “subscribers”, and for me as I have forum users who are not members, I set them as “no role for this site” in WP and as “participant” in BBpress.

Then each page and post can be set to a wp level – eg subscriber

[nick1900]

Sorry, my bad explanation. It wasn’t to do with the WP dashboard but with WP menus:

The Membership plugin I tested allowed me to drag an existing WP menu into a field for ‘users’ and one for say ‘ gold members’. You can then check which menu items are visible for each level.

It worked really well – when logged in the menu items specified for gold users appeared so I could have a list of the premium content. Not sure if this plugin works in the same way?

[Robin W]

the plugin works at page level rather than menu, so no you can’t set a whole menu in one go.

Haven’t seen your membership one, but since restrict content is a free one, why not just install it and see what it does, you can always delete it afterwards