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Membership 2 Pro Critique by Chris Lema

Chris Lema provided this critique about Membership 2 Pro. I am interested in using the plugin but would love to get your feedback to his critique, specifically these points:

I could not find any place to manually add a user. Trust me, that’s a very commonly requested feature for membership sites because you either have to comp someone or have to fix a registration that went sideways.

While they supported a single user being a part of multiple memberships – which is critical – I couldn’t find a way to create an upgrade and/or downgrade path.

And while it’s a feature only found in some of the best membership plugins, I would have wished there was any clear sense that I could pro-rate charges with their payment gateways.

I also noted that while the pro version works with a lot of other wpmu dev plugins, the MarketPress eCommerce plugin wasn’t on the list. I always want ecommerce integration.

Did I mention that I couldn’t adjust what profile fields I wanted to collect? That’s always a request from folks.

Sat, 2 Jan 2016 15:02:23
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  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hello Chris,

    I hope you’re well today and thank you for your question!

    The article you’re quoting was published by Chris Lema more than half a year ago. While some of his insights may have been partially justified at the time, our Membership 2 Pro has evolved significantly since then. Let me please break this quote down a bit :slight_smile:

    I could not find any place to manually add a user.

    Membership 2 Pro operates on WP user base. On your dashboard’s “Membership 2 -> Add Member” page you can either select any existing WP user or create a new WP user and then assign this user a membership.

    I couldn’t find a way to create an upgrade and/or downgrade path.

    Depending on how should I understand this statement, I can suggest two built-in solutions:

    1) When a member want’s to upgrade/downgrad/change membership:

    Each member has access to “Account” page where he/she can cancel, renew (if necessary) and change his/her membership

    2) For each membership there can be “Upgrade paths” predefined (on “Membership 2 -> Memberships -> [edit selected membership] -> Upgrade paths” page); For “finite” memberships (time limited access) there can be a “After this membership ends” automatic downgrade behavior pre-defined, for example: “Restrict access to Visitor-Level” (not-logged in user) or “Change to [selected membership]” (on “Membership 2 -> Memberships -> [edit selected membership] -> Access options” page).

    I would have wished there was any clear sense that I could pro-rate charges with their payment gateways.

    If by “pro-rate” Chris means that there should be a way to charge members on “pay as you go” or “post-payment” basis (e.g. depending on how much content they consumed) then indeed there’s no such feature. However there is an in-built add-on that you can activate that will “pro-rate” any previous payments when switching memberships!

    In case I got it wrong and you understand “pro-rate” term differently, let me know please and I’ll be happy to update my answer on this :slight_smile:

    I also noted that while the pro version works with a lot of other wpmu dev plugins, the MarketPress eCommerce plugin wasn’t on the list. I always want ecommerce integration.

    Membership 2 Pro and our MarketPress eCommerce plugin (which has been fully rewritten since Lema’s review) will work together out of the box in a way that Membership 2 protection rules can cover any MarketPress pages, e.g. you can cover selected products with membership protection so these products become available only for members of a certain membership. There’s even better scenario:

    MarketPress supports product variation, so a single product can have different prices assigned depending on selected variation. Membership 2 supports custom post type items protection.

    You can then create product “My Product” that would include e.g. 2 variations:

    – full price = $100

    – member price – $80

    Then on “Membership 2 -> Protection Rules -> Custom Post Type Items” page you will see three entries for “My Product” on the list:

    – “My Product” – product

    – “My Product” – variation x 2

    and set protection for one variation as “Visitors” (so it will be available only for non-logged in users) and the second one as selected membership (so it will be available only for members of this membership). This way the same product can be sold to different users of your site for different prices.

    Did I mention that I couldn’t adjust what profile fields I wanted to collect?

    There’s a built-in add-on for Membership 2 that you can enable. Then on “Membership 2 -> Settings -> Profile fileds” you will be able to select which of the existing profile fields will be used (visible, required or not) on sign-up page. Of course there are some fields that are obligatory by design such as e.g. e-mail or username but you can use for example BuddyPress x-profile fileds to create many more of them and then easily select which should be used on registration page.

    I hope that helps and if you have any further questions on this, I’ll be glad to help!

    Best regards,

    Adam