Jason Coleman

These forums are about to close. Please copy out any information you need. I would advise that you try to limit the number of plugins you are combining this way. Try to use the Members Add On for WooCommerce or use PMPro without WooCommerce. I think LearnPress may have gateway options too.

Good luck. If you’d like to continue this support, you are free to reach out to us at https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/support/. We will do our best to understand your setup to let you know if it is possible and what may need to be done.

Good luck with the site.

We have documentation on that here: https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/documentation/membership-levels/creating-a-new-membership/

You can edit the user and give them a membership level. Note that you can’t manually add recurring subscriptions or credit card payments. If you need to do that, you can use the Switch User plugin to switch to that user and process a checkout from the frontend.

These support forums will be closing soon. Be sure to reach out at https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/support/ for future support.

Hi there. This is odd behavior. There is a pmpro_level parameter passed along to the checkout page, which tells that page which level to check out for.

Your levels page has links like this (e.g. https://www.anthia.net/membership-account/membership-checkout/?pmpro_level=2) but for some reason when visiting those links the page is redirected and the parameter is removed.

I am not sure what is doing that redirect. It is not a normal part of Paid Memberships Pro.

We would want to look into custom code, plugins, caching systems… anything that might want to redirect.

This is a bit technical, but there is a plugin you can use to debug redirects, which might give you some information. Be careful with this plugin… it basically can break your site while giving you the debug info. https://github.com/sc0ttkclark/debug-wp-redirect

Let me know if you have any ideas RE what might be interfering. If you share your Site Health information here, we might see something.

Version 7.7.1 of LifterLMS just went out with a fix for this issue. Please let us know if things work after updating. And let us know if you continue to have issues here or with anything else. Thanks.

Version 7.7.1 of LifterLMS just went out with a fix for this issue. Please let us know if things work after updating. And let us know if you continue to have issues here or with anything else. Thanks.

We have a fix in place in the PR here: https://github.com/gocodebox/lifterlms/pull/2712

If you are familiar with how to test something like that, you could test the changes there to make sure it really clears the warnings from your logs.

Otherwise, we are doing some further testing and fixing some other small bugs in the 7.7 release and plan to have a 7.7.1 release by tomorrow that includes this fix.

It would be great if you could test that update coming out soon and let us know if that fixes things for you.

Thanks again for the quick and detailed report.

Thanks for sharing this error report. We are looking into this now and should have an update soon.

This user deleted their account soon after posting this review, so we cannot reply to them. But I can reply here to add context and address the points of the review in case anyone who stumbles upon this in the future has similar questions.

The free version of this is useless unless you spend nearly $600 to access a library of addons

There is no “pro” version of paid memberships pro. The free version available here on .org is the full core plugin. The core PMPro plugin has more functionality than most of its premium competitors. Further, all of our software, including all of our add ons listed as “Standard” or “Plus” on our website are available for free from our GitHub repositories. You can find more information on how to use all of the Paid Memberships Pro add ons for free here.

Their login form redirects users to the?Membership Levels?page after logging in. Why do that for members who already have memberships?

I’m not sure why OP would think this, but where users are redirected to on login is highly contested by WP plugins and themes. Our actual logic is to respect any previous “redirect_to” value and to redirect members to the account page and non-members to the levels page. You can see the code here.

There are many ways to adjust this through add ons (Member Homepage add on) or custom code (we have several tutorials on our site).

Controlling where users go on login is something we are considering taking more control over and developing a GUI for controlling. Because so many other bits of WP code interact with the filters involved in logins and login redirects, it is a rather opaque part of the site that is frustrating for non-technical users. There is room for improvement here for sure.

Instead of separate emails, your users receive a link to verify their email address in the?same?email used for welcoming and confirming their membership.

This is true if you are using our Email Confirmation add on. The confirmation email is intended to be a receipt of purchase. Some folks like to put content RE what is accessible in that email. There are other ways to schedule follow up emails or drip content. It should be noted that users don’t like getting tons of redundant emails after checkout, and things are more likely to be marked as spam when emails are sent repeatedly back-to-back. This is something we have to balance when choosing default behavior around emails. This can all be adjusted in various ways.

The header for every membership level is exactly the same: “Membership Level”.

OP here is talking about how we label the section of the checkout page that tells you which level you are purchasing. The heading is “Membership Level” and then the level name and description are shown within that section. I don’t think anyone who is running a membership site and wanting to make it clear which membership level the user is checking out for has issues with this formatting.

Another mindless feature of this plugin is that every page is unnecessarily prefaced with the word Membership

This helps to avoid conflicts with other plugins that might have “account” or “checkout” pages. All of the pages generated by PMPro can be edited like any WP page, including the ability to change the titles and slugs.

They’re obsessed with the word “membership”.

This, among other things in this review, leads me to believe that perhaps OP is not creating a membership site. FWIW we do have a code recipe on our site that we’ve made available for free, which shows you how to change the word “membership” to something else like “subscription” wherever it is found.

They have email short codes for everything except for Shipping Address. So if you have to ship something to a user, you can’t include their shipping address in the confirmation email.?

The Shipping Address plugin automatically appends the shipping address info into the confirmation email. I guess OP wants more control over how it is displayed through the same sorts of email tags the core plugin has. This is an interesting feature request and has been passed on to the devs.

Instead of allowing you to configure a confirmation for each specific membership level, you have to configure a template which is used by all of your levels.

For most sites, it’s fine to have one template for the checkout page, confirmation page, and confirmation emails. The purpose of all of those things is facilitate the checkout itself and confirm to users that their purchase worked. Members then gain access to the content on the site that their membership level allows them.

If you want to send users of different levels emails, most folks use an Email Marketing System (like Omnisend, ConvertKit, or MailPoet, etc) to send emails to users of specific levels.

Some do want more control over the content and format of the confirmation email on a per level basis, and this is possible now via custom code. We’d like to improve our email templates in general in the future, and allowing for further per-level customization without code is something we are considering. Most sites don’t need it or get by fine using our tutorials and paid support to set things up how they need.

For example if you want to sell t-shirts, guess how you have to set it up…… as a membership!

Again, I think OP is trying to use PMPro as a general purpose ecommerce plugin. We make many decisions that will make it harder to do things like sell t-shirts on your site, so we can focus on the core use case around selling memberships.

If your site requires stronger shipping and shopping cart functionality, you should consider something like WooCommerce. If the core of your site is focused on your members and shipping is a less important, or optional component, then PMPro will work great for you. It is also possible to run both PMPro and WooCommerce on the same site if you’d like to sell t-shirts and memberships.

FWIW the Addon Packages Add On was a way to sell access to a single post or page for a flat fee. This Add On is no longer needed since PMPro 3.0, where you can create groups of membership levels and users can purchase additional levels via the standard checkout process.

And the support is poor. Not even sure why they have support. They copy and paste links to their documentation, but as you can imagine the documentation is also half-baked.

Using OP’s profile info here as a hint, we did not find any related support requests here on .org, in our email system, or in our paid support system.

I think it would be hard to describe our support and documentation as half-baked after using it. Similarly, I think it’s hard to describe one of the longest run membership plugins, with more functionality than many of its premium competitors, as half-baked. It makes me question these parts of the review and the review in general.

If you’re going to use this, I recommend hiring your own developer and then just fork it, so that way you get it to look and work the way you want it to, and preserve your changes.

I wouldn’t follow this advice. All of our software, including our paid add ons, are available for free on www.ads-software.com or GitHub. This means, among other things, that you can actively participate in the development of our plugins in a way that isn’t possible with plugins like WooCommerce where the add ons are hidden in private repositories.

We have built the plugin according to best practices in WordPress development, and it’s nearly always easier and better to extend our code using hooks and filters vs forking the entire plugin. Besides just being faster to use a hook vs rewrite some code entirely, when you fork something, you lose the benefit of the continued maintenance and development that we are doing.

If you are building a site that is more focused on products over members, you should consider other options besides PMPro. It sounds like OP doesn’t like that our membership plugin doesn’t work out of the box for their exact non-membership need. I hope they find something that works for them.

If you’re looking for a plugin focused on selling memberships to real human members; a plugin that has been around for over a dozen years and has a strong, profitable company behind it’s maintenance; a plugin that is 100% free to install and use and easy to integrate with; Paid Memberships Pro is the best possible option for WordPress. We’re pleased every day to work on this project that enables so many people and organizations to “get paid” so they can live their lives and pursue their dreams.

Good luck with your sites.

Jason Coleman, Co-founder, Paid Memberships Pro

Sorry for missing your question so long ago. I’ll try to answer.

1. The pmpro-mailchimp plugin does try to send the user’s first and last name to MailChimp. Make sure you have FNAME and LNAME “merge fields” set up in MailChimp. They are by default, but maybe something happened. I also think some gateways may trigger the MailChimp API calls before the user is fully set up. Can you let me know which gateway you are using so we can test?
2. When a user upgrades, the pmpro_change_membership_level hook is fired and the pmpro-mailchimp plugin should send an update call to the MailChimp API. This will update the membership level related fields for them in MailChimp.

Let me know if this helps.

Hi, Jon.

We also removed any call to the incorrect function. I can’t find a reference to it here or anywhere else in the 2.12.10 code: https://plugins.svn.www.ads-software.com/paid-memberships-pro/tags/2.12.10/shortcodes/pmpro_member.php

I wonder if something didn’t go well in your upgrade. You can try to patch your own copy of your site by copy/pasting that file above.

You can also try to safely remove PMPro and reinstall it from the latest version and see how it works. You can remove the directory manually via FTP or you can remove the plugin from the plugins page, but FIRST go to Memberships > Settings > Advanced Settings in your dashboard, scroll to the bottom, and ensure that the “Uninstall PMPro on deletion?” option is set to No and saved.

We don’t like folks to have to do that, which is why we pushed a 2.12.10 version with that small change. The version bump should allow you to update automatically.

Sorry again for the trouble the update caused. If you find some other information about the issue, let us know.

2.12.10 just went out with the fix for this. Please let us know if you have any other issues.

Thanks so much for bringing this to our attention and your understanding while we fixed it.

Hi, Camilo. Thanks for your interest in Paid Memberships Pro and performance.

We are always open to ways to improve performance. That said, it’s not always easy. WordPress and PMPro are complicated pieces of software being used in a lot of different ways.

For your specific request, that file is about 34kb, only used by admins, and cached immediately by modern browsers. We’re not concerned about reducing the load there vs the downside of not having that JS available when we need it. For e.g. PMPro loads things on the edit post page, other plugins settings pages, some of our add ons need it, third party builders may need it.

There is some more info on this issue here: https://github.com/strangerstudios/paid-memberships-pro/pull/2024#issuecomment-1130057471

It should be noted that compared to your typical WP plugin, PMPro does A LOT of things, and so it is going to need more resources, more DB queries, more memory, etc. In practice, we try to keep our load comparable to other ecommerce and transaction plugins like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads.

We sometimes, e.g. when loading JS files, sacrifice small amounts of performance in order to make things more robust or easier for users and devs to work with.

In some cases, e.g. when exporting CSV files or running searches and complex queries will sacrifice usability and robustness to eek out an impactful performance gain.

If you are scaling a WP site to many thousands of users and posts, the same kinds of things that scale a website in general will scale PMPro. So e.g. if time to first load is super important to you for your admins or probably more likely your end users, there are many ways to hook into how JS and other assets are loaded to cache them optimally for your site. People have lots of different opinions and the optimal solution will always depend on the specific site and setup. Whenever possible, we’d like to make sure that they way we load things (e.g. using the WP core enqueue functions which can be hooked into) is done in a way that people can customize.

Let me know if this answers your questions or if you have other specific concerns. Feel free to search around the issues and PRs on our GitHub repo to see if someone else is already thinking about those things or working on them. There are for sure ways we can safely improve performance that just need a bit more attention and work from us. We have quite a few improvements in these areas coming out in our 3.0 release, dropping soon.

Hi there. Sorry you’ve run into an issue here. Thanks for providing the details you have. If you can find a mysql error from when the levels try to save, that would be helpful too.

I trust you that the DB tables are set up, but if you wanted to make sure all of the required tables were there, you could compare them to the queries in the file here: https://github.com/strangerstudios/paid-memberships-pro/blob/dev/includes/setup.sql

In the past, things like this have come up where for some reason the levels table (and maybe the orders table too?) was setup with the autoincrement value set to 0 and for some reason when we run the queries to insert the levels, it would try to insert with ID 0 instead of 1. I think there are some combinations of MySQL version and configuration where this might happen.

Manually setting the autoincrement value to 1 or inserting a level into the table through MySQL or a tool like Adminer (even if you later delete the level) would fix the issue and get the table defaulting new inserts with the appropriate ID.

I’m just throwing that out there as a possibility. It seems like you might have the technical know how to look into that.

To debug further, you could var_dump( $wpdb ) at this part of the code, which should show any MySQL error that occurs on the insert. We can also get the exact DB query tried and see if there is an error in our SQL. https://github.com/strangerstudios/paid-memberships-pro/blob/dev/classes/class-pmpro-levels.php#L172

Let me know if this helps and if you figure anything out. It’s possible we can update our code to keep this issue from happening for others on setups similar to yours.

Thanks.

Hi, Nico. Thanks for using PMPro.

While the email templates settings don’t have a WYSIWYG editor, you should be able to paste most HTML into the text area and that HTML will be used in the emails.

You can also edit the “header” and “footer” emails templates and include HTML there.

We have a post with an example of how to do that here: https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/generate-email-template-name-logo-member-communications/

Let me know if this helps.

@zo1111 I encourage you to keep your replies in the forums constructive.