WordPress Membership

Easy to use WordPress Membership plugin

WordPress Membership Site for Selling a Course that Starts in a Future Date

In this tutorial I will go over how to create a membership site to sell courses where all the members will start a course on the same date in the future.

The Goal

Lets say you want to setup a membership site to sell online courses. The courses will last ten weeks, with all participants in the course starting at the same time and going through the course as a group.

So a person may purchase a course today that won’t start until a month from today. Courses must be paid for in full before a person can participate [Read more…]

How to create a Video Membership Site with Complete Protection to Your Videos

With General Protection feature of WP eMember you can easily secure your videos from anonymous visitors. Here is how you do it:

  1. Create a post/page in WordPress.
  2. Embed the video on the post/page that you want to offer to the members of a particular membership level. (If you don’t know how to configure the basic membership settings using WP eMember please watch the video tutorial here).
  1. Go to WP eMember->Membership Level->Manage Content Protection section under WP Dashboard. In this section you can set which pages/posts you don’t want the anonymous visitors to see. In this case you can set protection to the post/page you just created and grant access to this post/page for a certain membership level (Detailed explanation can be found here).
  1. Now whenever any member from that particular membership level (the one you granted access to) logs in, the member will be able to view the content of the page (in this case: the video you embedded on that page). Any other anonymous visitors will be asked to log in when they stumble upon that post/page.

This will be good enough for most users but if you want to add another layer of protection for your super secret videos then continue reading.

Ultimate Video Lockdown

The key is to use Amazon S3’s private/protected file option.

To add complete protection to your videos we recommend you use the following two service/product with eMember:

  • Amazon S3 Account
  • WP Lightbox Ultimate Plugin

Amazon S3 has an option where you can make a video file private (If you are selling video content on your site then you should be using Amazon S3). Amazon S3’s private/protected video can only be retrieved by an application using a secure API so there is no way for anyone to go directly to the URL of the file and download it.

The WP Lightbox Ultimate plugin has an option that can use the secure amazon s3 API and allows you to embed private/protected Amazon S3 videos on a WordPress post or page.

The following steps will ensure the complete protection of your videos:

Step 1: Upload your videos to Amazon S3 and make the files private/protected so no one can retrieve the file without the secure API (only you know the API access keys).

Step 2: Embed the private video on your WordPress post or page using the WP Lightbox Ultimate Plugin. You can directly embed the private/protected video on the page (no lightbox) or embed it using the lightbox option (the video will play in a lightbox).

Step 3: Protect the WordPress post or Page using eMember so only members with the correct permission can see the content of the page.

The following video explains how this protected/private Amazon S3 video works with the Lightbox Ultimate plugin:

WP eMember

Another Method of Creating a Video Membership Site

Check the limiting access to video content tutorial to learn another method of offering videos to your members.