Building A Website: Part 3
Setting Up The Membership
While we have now created our product, it is only a part of the puzzle. Even though users can buy the membership, there isn’t anything set up yet that actually creates it and gives them access to anything. In order to do this we are going to need the membership plugin through Woocommerce which you can download at the bottom of this page. Using this plugin, once users purchase the membership they will have an account automatcally created and be given access to all the content that we specify. So download, install, and active the plugin and let’s get stated.
Create The Membership
Once activated, let’s go to our dashboard to see if anything has changed or there are any updates we may need.
So the first think I notice is that WooCommerce is alerting us that there is currently no SSL certificate installed. So hop on over to your hosting and install an SSL certificate on the domain. If you see that you already have an SSL certificate installed and you are still seeing this message then you may need to enforce HTTPS which can be done in the same area of SiteGround. I’m not going to worry about the apple pay since I’m not going to accept it.
After that go to the WooCommerce tab and go to the memberships seciton.
As you can see we currently don’t have any members, which makes sense because we don’t have any membership plans created either. So let’s go over the the ‘Membership Plans’ tab and create one.
If you see the ‘connect your store’ message like I do you can connect it if you’d like, though I’m going to skip that step for now. It is not essential to being able to run your site at all.
Go ahead click the ‘Add Membership Plan’ button. This will take you to a section where you can create a membership plan. You can create as many as you want, but we are only going to create one.
Give it a title of ‘MWD Design Academy Lifetime Membership’.
Next, select the option to gain access upon purchase of a product and enter in ‘mwd’ and select our product.
After that, go to the restrict content section. Once there select the option by category and type in ‘class’. This will allow us to give access to all posts with the category of ‘class’ once a user purchases the lifetime membership product.
That’s about all there is to it. We won’t have any members till someone signs up, and we can always create a member manually to test everything, but we can do that later. For now publish the membership plan and let’s move forward and start doing some styling.