i'm not a competent enough user for this but the support is very responsive.

Hi,

Sorry you did not manage to setup the plugin. This is pretty easy bit we indeed lack a basic and fool-proof getting started guide.

The plugin does not have a background structure as you call it. It uses very standard WordPress pages with shortcodes to display its private content. Lots of other plugins do that: WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, etc. Just to name a few major ones.

I would be curious to know how and wwhy the plugin broke your logout link. You must have done something wrong. To solve your issues, before saying a plugin is bad just because you can’t set it up, try to open a support thread. I don’t see why thousands are happy with this plugin and you can’t get it to work.

Regards,

Vincent

Thank you for your diplomatic approach. by background structures I meant pages that are children of a member’s area page. However, the customer area dashboard redirected my home page to itself. Yes, I do not know where options like that are hidden for it is not in any menu or database table I know how to find. However, I cannot appreciate a plugin making any such deep changes without my explicit understanding.

I have WP Modal login set up with custom redirects to avoid wp-login and wp-logout. even after deactivating and removing customer area these links remain changed to somewhere I didn’t set them to go to. Moreover, I need paid memberships pro to charge for something very offline indeed. And as if that weren’t enough, I need pmpro register helper to add file fields to user meta and theme my profile to enable the user to edit these. Yes, a mess of a setup and fragile.

Maybe you could tell me where this plugin makes any changes so I can try to retrace everything that’s not working now?

Yes, a mess of a setup and fragile.

And so don’t you think that a 1-star rating is not appropriate? In your case, the combination of plugins is the root cause of the problem, not Customer Area. You could also rate 1-star the other plugins just because they don’t play nice with Customer Area…

However, when dealing with complex websites, the constructive way to act is not to shoot at a plugin author, rather to request support on the forums and try to solve the problem. This both:

– makes plugins better by fixing compatibility issues that may not have been detected
– encourages developers to still publish open-source plugins (without those authors, WordPress would be either dead or expensive by now).

However, the customer area dashboard redirected my home page to itself.

Most probably you have not setup the pages properly in your WordPress site. This is the most common reason for such redirect behaviours.

However, I cannot appreciate a plugin making any such deep changes without my explicit understanding.

None of the pages of Customer Area are created automatically by the plugin: you are explicitly asked to create those pages once the plugin gets activated.

Maybe you could tell me where this plugin makes any changes so I can try to retrace everything that’s not working now?

Customer Area only makes 3 changes:

1. It creates standard WordPress pages (a root page called “Customer Area” and several child pages)

2. It creates a navigation menu (under Appearance > Menus

3. It saves its options in the WordPress options table in your database (the options entry is named something like cuar_…)

By no means, Customer Area makes changes to any other installed plugin.