Tips and Tricks

Handling form layout when using a builder plugin

Chad Butler · Jan 31, 2018 ·

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Builder plugins (and themes that use them) such as SiteOrigin, Elegant Builder, Divi, and others, have become more popular.

Without beating a topic that’s already been beat to death in the WordPress developer community, let me just say that I’m conflicted. I generally agree with the assessment provided by Pippin Williamson:

Builders provide a poor user experience and cause significant compatibility problems for other plugins.

The other big issue is that their use violates a primary reason for using a CMS in the first place – separating content from design. Using a builder embeds design elements into the content which is a major design flaw from a CMS site management perspective.

On the other hand, I also agree with Chris Lema – builders exist because there is a market demand for them:

Why do people want WordPress Page Builders?

Simple. They offer customers a solution for personalization that mass-produced themes can’t offer, while at a lower price than working with a professional web developer and web designer.

A bigger problem than simple compatibility however, is that there is simply no industry standardization. In the WP development community, most successful plugin developers work with WP’s core standards. That makes it easier for everyone because if something isn’t initially compatible, a couple of adjustments with filter/action hooks and you’re dovetailing seamlessly. Continue Reading →

Restrict Registration to MailChimp List Subscribers

Chad Butler · Jan 17, 2018 ·

Generally, the WP-Members MailChimp extension is used to subscribe users to your list when they register. But using the extension’s API, it can also be used to restrict site registration to users who are subscribed an existing MailChimp list.

This process requires the WP-Members MailChimp Integration extension.

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Adding MailChimp Interest Groups

Chad Butler · Oct 24, 2017 ·

The MailChimp extension will be adding support for Interests (also known as Interest Groups) in a future version. Until that is added, there is a way you can utilize Interests now with a little bit of custom code added to your theme’s functions.php file. Continue Reading →

Create a login modal

Chad Butler · Aug 10, 2017 ·

This tutorial will describe the process of creating a login form modal for WP-Members. The process uses jQuery to display the form overlay and AJAX for logging the user in. jQuery is also used to handle changing the menu link to display as a login/logout link.

(What’s a Modal? Essentially, this is a “popup” that loads over the page. In this case, it will contain a login form that loads in front of the page. The page is dimmed when the modal is active.)
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Validate Registration Based on MailChimp Subscription Status

Chad Butler · Aug 7, 2017 ·

This is one of those things that I never thought of but came up in a discussion with a support subscriber. Can registration be validated based on whether a user is subscribed to the MailChimp list or not? If the user is subscribed, allow registration but if not return an error message.

The answer is yes, that’s quite possible. WP-Members allows custom validation via the wpmem_pre_register_data action hook, and the MailChimp extension has an API function (wpmem_mc_get_list_member()) to check a list subscriber’s status. The combination of those two things can be used to accomplish this in a simple code snippet. Continue Reading →