How to Set Up MemberPress – Step by Step

Introduction

In this article you'll learn how to set up the MemberPress Plugin after migrating your membership from MemberMouse.

If you haven't already, make sure to read the first part of this tutorial on how to migrate from MemberMouse to MemberPress.

What you will need

1 – MemberPress Plugin

Setting up Memberships in MemberPress

1 – To create or edit a membership, go to Memberpress -> Membership -> Add New

2 – Name your membership whatever you like, e.g. “Gold plan”.

3 – In the text editor box below the title, enter a description.

This description will appear on the checkout form when folks go to sign up.

4 – In the right sidebar set the price, billing type, interval and other information related to payments.

You can set the billing to be a one-time fee or a recurring payment.

You can also make it a lifetime access plan, monthly expiration plan, fixed expiration plan and/or trial access for trial periods (including $0 trials).

5 – Scroll down and set the additional settings in the respective tabs:

• Registration 
• Permissions
• Price Box 
• Advanced

MemberPress Registration Setup

Your options related to registration are:

A) Register button text customization

B) Thank you messages customization

C) Welcome email customization

D) Accepted payment methods (Paypal, Stripe, etc.)

E) User information fields customization (available after setting custom user fields on MemberPress -> Options)

F) Membership shortcodes

MemberPress Permissions configuration

This section allows you to configure WHO can purchase the membership.

You can can:

A) Allow users to have multiple, active subscriptions to a single membership

B) Control who can access the membership.

For example: you have “Gold enterprise” and “Gold” membership plans. You can set it so that only those folks who are currently enrolled in the “Gold” membership plan can access and register for the “Gold enterprise” plan.

C) Set the message that folks see when they try to access something they don't have permission to view.

Setting up the MemberPress Price Box

In this tab you can customize different information that will be displayed or included in the Group Page.

You will get something like this for the registration on the front end:

MemberPress Advanced Options

This tab has advanced options for customizing your membership page:

A) Setting custom membership access URL

B) Enable membership pricing terms

C) Setting custom login redirect URL

Setting up MemberPress Access Rules

Set up rules following: Memberpress -> Rules -> Add New.

Here, you can restrict access of your content to members of a specific membership plan.

Choose what you want to hide (post or page of your website) and then choose who can access to this content.

You can choose to protect access to:

A) All content (set exceptions by ID)

B) All posts or all pages (set exceptions by ID)

C) Specific posts or pages

D) Child of a particular page

E) Categories

F) Pages

G) Tags

H) Custom post types

I) Custom URI

Protecting your MemberPress Pages Using Tags

Note that unlike MemberMouse, MemberPress doesn't have a content protection widget on your posts and pages. 

But I found a workaround for that inconvenience using tags and tag rules. 🙂

Here's a video that explains how it works:

There are also some additional options you can configure.

A couple of the more important ones are the drip and expire options.

Drip allows you to enable drip feeding.

For example: if a user signs up today, they will have partial access to your content.

For example, after 12 days, the next package or the rest of the content will be unlocked and become fully available to them.

Expire lets you expire access to content after a certain amount of time.

This is useful for “limited access” offers. 

For instance, if you released a course today and you want access to it to expire after a week, you can do so by setting this option.

Unauthorized access handling lets you configure what will happen if someone tries accessing a page they’re not supposed to.

For example, you can display a message that they don’t have access to this content and then provide a login form or a link to sign up for one of the membership plans you offer which would grant them access to this content.

Creating Coupons in MemberPress

Coupons allow you to offer a discount for your memberships.

To create a coupon, go to Memberpress -> Coupons -> Add New.

You can choose to set the discount mode: standard, first payment only and trial override.

A) Standard – can be applied without any special rules or restrictions.

B) First payment only – can only be used by new users.

C) Trial override – will override the trial.

Example: you have a 30-day trial for your memberships and you offered a coupon code that lets users access your content for free for 60 days.

Instead of making their entire access time 90 days, the 60-day access of the coupon code will take effect instead.

You can set whether the coupon can be used unlimited times or will become invalidated after a certain number of uses.

Also you can set an expiration date for the coupon and then choose which membership(s) the coupon code can be applied to.

MemberPress Reminders (Dunning)

Set up reminders for users when their subscription is about to expire.

Go to Memberpress -> Reminders:

Triggers have a full range of settings.

For example, initiate a reminder in 5 days before the subscription expires, and then send an email to the user and administrator about the reminder.

Setting up MemberPress Subscriptions

Go to Memberpress -> Subscription.

Recurring and non-recurring subscriptions are separated by tabs.

You can find following information in this page:

A) Transaction code

B) Name of user

C) Type of membership

D) Registration and expiration date

E) The payment gateway

F) Price of their plan

G) Status (active or not)

How MemberPress Transactions Work

Go to Memberpress -> Transactions:

This screen displays the same information as the subscriptions page but with a few additional items.

Here you can see whether a member's transaction is completed, pending or failed.

You can also edit transactions.

For example, you can manually approve a member’s membership, disable it, upgrade it, change pricing and more.

The main thing to know about MemberPress's transactions system is that transactions are what give your members access.

Subscriptions don't grant access; transactions do. 

And transactions need to be completed and cover the date range during which you want to allow access to your content.

For example, a member won't be able to access content if the transaction end date has already passed, even if the transaction was completed successfully.

So if you have a member who can't access their content, start by checking their latest transaction to see if it went through, and where or not it covers the current date.

Memberpress Shortcodes

MemberPress's shortcodes can be used to display a membership signup form or a link to a membership page wherever you want on your site.

They can also protect content in a way that's similar to MemberMouse's SmartTag Equations.

Go to the Memberships page:

When you edit or create a Membership plan, you'll find additional options at the bottom of the page.

Under the registration tab go to membership shortcodes link to display all of the available shortcodes for the current membership page you are editing.

There are three different shortcodes.

1 – Signup Link Shortcode

The first shortcode allows you to display a link pointing to a particular membership signup page (the one which you are currently editing). The shortcode format looks like this:

Optional link label here…

If you leave the link label empty, then it will default to the title or name of the membership plan it links to.

This shortcode can be used anywhere on your site to link to one of your membership signup pages.

2 – Signup Form Location Shortcode

The second shortcode can only be used in the membership page itself. Basically, you can use this shortcode to control where the signup form would appear in the page.

By default, the signup form in the membership signup page is displayed after all the content you put in it.

Example: if you add images, texts, headings, and CTAs, only after those elements the membership signup form will appear.

By using the second shortcode, you can control where the form would appear.

The second shortcode looks like this:

3 – Signup Form Shortcode

If you want to embed the membership signup form on other posts or pages or even on widgets and custom post types, you can use the third shortcode which looks like this:

This shortcode can be used anywhere on your site on any post, page, widget or custom post type.

Conclusion

In this article you've learned how to configure the MemberPress plugin after migrating from MemberMouse. 🙂

If you have any questions please ask them in comments.