We’ve done a lot of custom work recently for clients using Paid Membership Pro. Paid Membership Pro is a membership plugin geared more for developers, and they provide a lot of code recipes to help you extend the plugin. Sometimes, though, a clients need specific functionality not built into the plugin. And that is where custom plugins, built entirely around the client’s requirements, are invaluable.
So I wanted to recap some of work we’ve done recently for Paid Membership Pro.
Paid Membership Pro Sponsored Seats with GUI
Paid Membership Pro provides a plugin for sponsored members, which allows a person — for example a manager — to purchase memberships for his employees. A recent client wanted to offer these types of memberships, however, they didn’t want to have to code these sponsored memberships. Paid Membership Pro’s sponsored members plugin provides a code recipe that is then added and edited via a custom plugin (or your theme’s function.php file). There is no GUI.
So we created a new sponsored members plugin that provides two important features:
1 – GUI.
The settings for sponsored members are in the WordPress dashboard in the Membership Levels settings.
You can use only one membership level for both parent and child memberships, or if you want to provide different content access to sponsored members, you can assign a different level to them.
You can also choose either fixed price or range based pricing. Range based pricing allows you to set different prices depending on how many seats are purchased.
2 – Checkout Page Details
Membership cost for seats is displayed on the checkout page when you select additional number of seats. This is obviously very helpful for end user, because they see all billing details for additional seats on checkout page before they checkout.
Annual Payment Option with GUI
Paid Membership Pro has a plugin that allows you to display different pricing options on the checkout page. It works great, but it requires a separate membership level for each different pricing plan. It also requires coding to configure the different pricing plans (i.e. no GUI). Our client wanted the option to add a yearly payment plan to an existing membership level from within the membership level settings.
Register Helper
The Register Helper plugin from Paid Membership Pro allows you collect additional data on the checkout and member profile pages. Again, though, it requires digging into code to configure. We’ve customized the checkout / member profile pages for several clients recently, including integrating collected data into BuddyPress profiles.
Paid Membership Pro’s Approach
I mentioned at the beginning of this post that Paid Membership Pro is geared toward developers. Their approach provides several benefits, the biggest one being that you only use / activate what you need. This allows them to keep the core plugin lean.
The downside for many users, though, is that it requires getting deep into code to add additional functionality. Paid Membership Pro provides a lot of code recipes — with detailed instructions — as well as great support in their support forums, but sometimes that’s not enough. Especially if you have no previous working experience with PHP!
So that’s where the Pixel Happy Team comes in 🙂 We’re here to help you if you get stuck or just need something customized to your specific requirements.
If that’s you, contact us and let us know what you need.