Home of WP-Members, The Original WordPress Membership Plugin
Chad Butler · ·
This is an important best practice – never, ever modify plugin files directly.
Rule 1: there is never a good reason to do this.
Rule 2: refer to rule 1. Continue Reading →
Chad Butler · ·
One of the basic elements of WordPress best practices is to use a Child Theme. This allows you to make customizations to your theme without worrying about losing those changes when the theme author releases an update. It’s simple to set up and should be a standard practice when setting up a new site.
This example will create a child theme of the WordPress default theme Twenty Seventeen. The purpose of this exercise is to help you get a custom child theme so you can store custom functions for customizing WP-Members. It is not intended to be a complete process of developing child themes and custom template files. There are plenty of those resources available on the Internet, starting with the WordPress Codex.
Chad Butler · ·
What is the “more” tag?
A significant amount of content regarding WP-Members setup involves something called the “more” tag. This tag, which has been around since the beginning of WordPress, essentially does the job of creating an excerpt out of the content.
But what does it look like and how do you use it?Continue Reading →
Chad Butler · ·
IMPORTANT: This article remains here for legacy purposes. There are many users who utilize pluggable functions in the plugin and have not updated these processes to utilize hooks and filters. There are also articles buried in this blog that have customizations that use a pluggable function (if you find one, let me know). HOWEVER, pluggable functions, while still supported, are not the preferred way of customizing plugin features. Like WordPress core, these were the original way to customize, but as filter and action hooks were added to the application, pluggable functions were not longer necessary. The API for WP-Members is much more mature than it was when pluggable functions were introduced. There really should be no reason to use pluggable functions at this point. If you are working on customizing on your own and you see no other way than to use a pluggable function, mention it to me as there may be a better way, or maybe there needs to be a new filter or action in the plugin.
Making direct changes to the functions within the plug-in is discouraged because it puts the user in a difficult situation. These types of changes are generally referred to as “hacks” and hacks must be reapplied anytime you upgrade the plug-in. Avoiding upgrades because of the need to update your hacks is a bad practice because upgrades often include important security updates.
So to make things a little more extensible, I have introduced pluggable functions to the WP-Members plug-in. Pluggable functions are functions that can be recreated outside of the plug-in itself without the need to make changes to the core script files directly. This way the plugin can be customized so that when you upgrade, your customizations will not be overwritten. Continue Reading →
The functions.php file is an important element in customizing WordPress. It is also an important element in terms of customizing and integrating WP-Members into your site.
While you are not required to do any customization to get WP-Members to work on your site (it is, after all, a plugin), to leverage the power of the framework and thus make it look professional and seamless on your site, you will need to have some knowledge of the functions.php file. Continue Reading →
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