Membee Announces Powerful Login Plugin for WordPress
Consistent with its philosophy of “why re-invent the wheel when we can integrate with it”, Membee announced today a login management plugin for the dominant website content management system; WordPress. WordPress has established itself as the clear leader amongst content management systems (CMS) for websites. With its roots deep in the “open source” philosophy and …
Consistent with its philosophy of “why re-invent the wheel when we can integrate with it”, Membee announced today a login management plugin for the dominant website content management system; WordPress.
WordPress has established itself as the clear leader amongst content management systems (CMS) for websites. With its roots deep in the “open source” philosophy and surrounded by a vibrant community of contributors committed to “giving back”, one can see why there would be a natural connection between WordPress and the broad community of membership based organizations. Here are few quick WordPress facts:
- 54 million sites in 120 languages are managed in WordPress
- 6 times more sites managed in WordPress as compared to its nearest competitor (Joomla)
- 20,401 plugins (add-ons) exist to extend the capabilities of WordPress
- NBC Sports, CNN, and UPS along with dozens of other Fortune 500 companies use WordPress
What is the Membee Member Login Plugin and What Does it Do?
In a nutshell, Membee’s Member Login plugin makes it super easy for a client organization to use Membee to manage member access to content and features within their WordPress site. Organizations using Membee and managing their site in WordPress gain the following advantages:
- Control access to all member features, tools, and content on their site in one place; Membee.
- Easily (check a check box kind of easy) designate what content pages are “members only”.
- Provide true member single sign on – no matter what the member logs into on the site, they are then logged in to everything and won’t get prompted to login again during their visit.
- Enjoy full support for Membee’s optional social login features to allow members to access “members only” content on their site by letting them use their LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, or Facebook identities to login.
- Put Membee’s Access Roles feature to work by setting up access for only specific committees and/or groups to access specific content on the site intended only for that group of members.
- Update a member’s access privileges (add or remove) in only one place, Membee, and have those changes instantly modified in the WordPress site
- They maintain full control – if they need to deactivate access for a member, one mouse click in Membee causes the member to instantly lose access to all Membee features (event pricing, member profile, etc.) and access to "all “members only” content in the WordPress site
- Setting it up takes minutes, just download and activate the plugin in their WordPress site – no coding!
- One final point, it is FREE!
So, that is what the plugin does but what does all of this mean in terms of tangible benefits for your organization?
Advantage 1 for Your Organization: More Options, Cheaper Options
Since membership capabilities are so very important on effective membership sites, “what” you needed your site to do dictated to your organization “who” could provide those services. That limited your options and limits lead to scarcity and we all know what scarcity does to the price.
The community of WordPress developers is truly global which presents an abundance of capable, talented people. In a positive way and contrary to the impact of scarcity, we know what a positive impact abundance has on price! With this abundance also comes a vast array of site development services and their associated price points which place control back in the hands of the organization, not the supplier.
Advantage 2 for Your Organization: Ease of Use
Really, there is nothing new here. We’re talking about controlling access to content and features for either the entire membership or select subsets of members. With enough time, money, and technical resources, all of this was doable a decade ago.
The game changer here is the ease with which you can accomplish the same capabilities. A couple of recent examples shared with us by new organizations coming to Membee were that they were excited about reintroducing “members only” features into their websites. Reintroducing? Really? Yes, when compared to earlier versions, the current versions of their websites actually took steps backwards in terms of these capabilities.
To put the new Membee Login plugin to work on your WordPress site, you login to your WordPress site, download the Membee plugin into Plugins, activate it, and decide which of Membee login options you would like to use.
The greatest, coolest features in the world are useless if they cannot be deployed easily. Period.
No coding!
Advantage 3 for Your Organization: Go Beyond “Members Only” Content
There is no doubt that controlling access to valuable member content is an important aspect for nearly every member organization’s website. Developing this plugin to accomplish that goal in an easy and straightforward way would be reason enough to develop and release the plugin.
When we were looking at WordPress, one aspect of the whole WordPress experience stuck out for us. The simple fact that developers had invested their personal energy and resources to produce more than 20,000 plugins for WordPress spoke volumes to us on many levels.
By integrating Membee at the lowest levels in WordPress, an opportunity is created for client organizations to control access to features that go far beyond website content. For example, suppose an organization has 4 main groups of members representing 4 main disciplines in their profession (or industry, either way). This organization wants to provide an online “collaborative space” where members can share documents, ideas, and dialogue with either the entire membership or only with fellow members within their own discipline. The organization wants members to access either the “general” collaborative area which all members have access to or the collaborative area set aside for only members in that member’s particular discipline.
There are several collaborative platforms available as plugins in WordPress (we used bbPress to test this idea). When combined with Membee’s Member Login plugin, the ability to make portions of a collaborative space available to specific groups of members became a powerful combination. On top of that, and to have not one but several options to accomplish this within WordPress, for the gang here in the hive, hooking Membee to WordPress became a no brainer!
Wondering what new member benefits and features you could add into your site, maybe start by checking out the Plugin Directory on wordpress.org.
We Have or Are Getting a WordPress Site – Where Do We Start?
Well, everything you need can be found in the Membee Member Login listing in the WordPress Plugin Directory. As usual, there are some “best practice” ideas from the Membee Customer Service team to help you along the way and that can be found in “Setting Up Membee’s Integrated Login with Your WordPress Site” (remember to have your Membee username and password handy).
What if We Don’t Have a WordPress Site?
No problem! Membee’s Membee Single Sign-On Service can be used by your web developer to provide the same capabilities as described here, maybe with a little more work. This service is designed to work on any platform and in any CMS.