Knowledgebase

Step 1 - Downloading

First, you need to obtain your license key and download the plugin. Login to our client area and click on "My Products & Services" at the top of the screen. Here you will be able to see the services and products you have ordered. Click on the green icon to the right of your license. This will open your license where you will be able to see your license key and download our plugin (shown in image).

Step 2 - Uploading

Unzip the zipped plugin you downloaded from our website. This should extract a folder, upload this folder to the wp-content/plugins/ folder of your blog. Uploading is most commonly done using an ftp program. There are a lot of ftp programs available, one of the most commonly used free programs is FileZilla.

Step 3 - Activation

Once uploaded, login to your blog and click on "settings" and then "general settings" , half way down this page you will see "Allow anyone to register", make sure that there is a tick in this box and click on save.

Click on "plugins" in the sidebar menu, here you should see the plugin you just uploaded. If not, check that the Plugin folder that you unzipped contains files and you have not unzipped it into a folder as this can cause a double folder which will stop the plugin from working. Click on "Activate" next to your membership plugin.

When this activates for the first time, it will automatically show a yellow error message. There is no need to panic, this message is simply to remind you that you need to enter your license key. If you look at the sidebar in the admin menu, you will notice that under the "plugins" header, there will be a new link for your plugin license key (shown in image). Clicking on it will load the plugin license page where you can enter your license in the box provided. When you click on save, it should display a confirmation message.

Step 4 - Settings

Click on "Setup and General settings". Here you should enter the requested information (e-mail and site name) and click on "save data". Once you have clicked on save data you will notice that the page has changed from "Setup and General settings" to "General Settings". This is because the main portion of the settings that you completed in step 3 have been saved. You should scroll down the page and fill in all the details that are requested. Under Email settings you will see "mailer", this section can be left blank if you choose the php mail option from the dropdown menu. If you prefer to use smtp, you should fill in the server, user and password boxes. make sure that you check with your email supplier to see if you need to use authentication. The access settings section at the bottom lets you set the whole blog as being publicly viewable or private as well as protecting your pages and posts from becoming public if you deactivate the Plugin. This can be very useful as a search engine could easily index your site while the posts and pages were left unprotected.

Step 5
Using the plugin admin menu, click on "Gateways". This will load your gateways page with the 3 available gateways. These are Trial, Free & Paypal (paid subscription). To view the settings for each gateway you can click on the "edit" link to the right of the gateway you wanted to edit.

You should not deactivate any gateways. If you do not need to use a gateway, you can simply not supply a subscription that uses that gateway.

Paypal

This gateway contains all the details that are used to process your paying members subscriptions.

Main settings
Your paypal email address - this address must match your login address for your paypal account. It must be your primary email address for your paypal account.
Paypal return url - this should be automatically filled, but can be changed if you want your new subscribers to be sent to a differant area of your blog after successfully completing the payment process.
Paypal cancel url - as with the return url, this section should also be automatically filled by Wordpress Membership Plugin, but again you can change it to send users who for whatever reason do not complete the payment process or canel it before paying.
Paypal button/logo - here you can upload an image that will be used for paypal subscriptions. This section will not create a subscription button, but is insread used to give your paying subscriptions a logo of your choice. You do not need to have a logo if you do not want one.
Description - use this section to tell your prospective users about what benefits they will receive as a paying subscriber as well as what payments you will accept. Depending on your paypal settings, you may not accept certain payments such as e-cheques or bank transfers.

Subscription options
Live switch - use this dropdown box to switch your blog from sandbox (paypal test mode) and live. You can only accept new users when using the live mode.
Payment type - here you select whether you want your payments to be subscriptions or single one off payments. In subscription mode the user would be billed at the frequency you set in step 5, with single payments the user would be reminded that they needed to make another payment once their current payment period had expired.
Currency - select the currency in which you want to accept your users subscription payments.
Local paypal site - select the paypal site closest to your geographical location.

Encrypted button guide
This section will allow you to set up encrypted paypal buttons using OpenSSL. This is not required, but some users prefer to do this to further protect their site from hackers attempting to setup fake subscriptions or attempting to obtain your paypal e-mail address. If you do not want to have encrypted buttons, you can leave this section as it is.

Click on "update options" to save the details you have entered on this page before continuing.

Step 6 - Paypal
Our Plugin uses paypal Instant Payment Notification (IPN). This system will inform your site when a user has successfully paid or if they have missed a payment. This keeps your site up to date with the latest user payment information, but it must be setup correctly in paypal.

To do this you must first login to paypal. Once logged in, click on "profile" in the menu at the top (under "my account"). This will load a page with 3 columns. Under the 3rd column (Selling preferences) you will see "Instant Payment Notification Preferences". Clicking on it will load a small page with Instant Payment Notification Preferences at the top of the screen. Click on "edit" whcih will open your IPN settings.

Here you must make sure that IPN is turned on and the IPN url is as follows. http://YourDomain.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-member/modules/paypal_paypal.php replacing "yourdomain.com" with the location of your blog. If you are using your paypal account for another system that uses IPN such as an online shop you may already have an address in the IPN box. If this is the case, you can leave the current address in the IPN box and our Plugin will still be able to operate. When finished, click on save.

If you receive an error stating that your IPN address can not be blank, simply enter the web address for your blog. When a payment is made, the user is sent to paypal with all relevant details and the return IPN address. This is why you do not need to enter a direct IPN in paypal.

You are now finished the entire setup process. If you received any errors while activating and installing our plugin, please check our list of error messages located here.

What now?
We have two main support sections.
Plugin Functions and Features covers each page of our plugin. It is designed so that if you have a question about a specific page of the admin section of our plugin, you can select the corresponding support article where each setting and option will be fully described.
Tips, How To's and Guides covers the various ways you can complete tasks using our plugin. Unlike the Plugin Features and Functions section which only covers our plugin page by page, our tips, how to's and guides cover entire tasks such as creating subscriptions and assigned membership levels, manually adding a user and many more.