If you're looking to design your very own membership site but are still using WordPress as your content management system its about time you look into Drupal. Drupal is a more robust CMS that allows you to put together a content rich website in ways an individual could only dream of doing with WordPress. So let's take a look at everything we'll need to get started, shall we?
In WordPress you have what are called plugins. These are additional addons to the core system that allow it to do extra tasks. Drupal refers to plugins as modules. The majority of the modules available can be found on the Drupal website. So the two main modules you need on any Drupal installation are CCK and Views. CCK allows you to create additional content types well above and beyond the usual posts and pages. You can create elaborate profile pages for yourself and members or even put together a simple form consisting of a title and body that only certain users have access to on your website. The views module allows you to put together lists, display names of members, show your most popular products and much more.
Now that we have the Views and CCK modules it's time to grab the bread and butter for our membership site: Ubercart, Role Expire, and Node Privacy by Role. Ubercart is the shopping cart system that allows you to process credit card orders from your potential customers. It integrates with PayPal, Google Checkout and a variety of other popular online merchants. Role expire allows you to create a specific role in your system that will expire after a predetermined length of time. This length of time can be in days, months or even years.
Once you have your role created and your permissions have been set accordingly you can create your new product. If you are setting up a Silver Membership, then that would be the name of your product. Set your product to be associated with the new role you created. Whenever someone orders your Silver Membership they will automatically be given a role on your site, a unique username and password to log in, and a count down clock until they have to renew.
Now you can begin creating content for your members only section using the Node Privacy by Role module. Any piece of content can now have permissions set to only allow a specific role access to the content. You can go even further creating a new CCK type or by setting permissions on specific CCK fields that only your members can see. This can be useful if you want to create a teaser for non members, to give them a taste of what they can expect if they upgrade their membership.
Drupal is a very powerful CMS and can be used for a variety of projects. Give it a try on your next project and see if it meets your needs as an internet marketer.
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