Take a look at WP-Members – I think that will do most/some of what you want.
Thx!
This is helpful.
At first glance it looks like it could work but what I’m not seeing in either WP-Members or groups, is a method to email invite people to register and view the premium content pre-approved.
WP-Members looks to require the admin to approve the registrant. It’s just a different work flow than what I’m after.
When I get back to this project, I will have to dig into both of these plugins further to see what is possible.
WP Members has an option to switch off admin approval of registrations. It doesn’t allow you to send bulk emails, though. I’m probably misunderstanding you, but I don’t see how you’re going to know about people who aren’t members – by definition, these must be folks who you don’t have on file as members, so I can’t see that any WP plug-in would/could email them. All those I’ve seen (User Messages etc) only email people that are already registered. as members of your site. Or maybe you mean you want to invite some existing members to join a particular group?
The current website (Not a WordPress site) works as follows:
The organizer is able to bulk email volunteers (who she does know or provides a link the chapter leaders can share) inviting them to use the resources on the volunteer website. The link has an encoded password string so they are allowed to register and use the site. From this point they create their own password and have access.
I’m just trying to replicate that functionality for them. Its not particularly secure but this content is not particularly sensitive either.
WP Members requires the admin to approve new registrations to have access to the site which inserts a delay of access.
They might agree to change the work flow.
Ah! I see what you mean now. Well, I think you’re going to need a variety of plug-ins to achieve this.
First off: WP-Members doesn’t have to be set to require Admin approval of registrations – you can switch this behaviour off in it’s Options panel. However, its big advantage for you is that you can define custom fields for user-data, which you said earlier you’d need.
If you’re absolutely sure that all members can/should have access to the secure content, and if you already have a list of them, then you can bulk-import them into WP using something like the ‘Import Users from CSV’ plug-in, which I think is still around. Once that’s done, then you can email them from within WordPress using something like the ‘Email Users’ plug-in. Word Press allows you to password-protect particular pages or posts, so you could include the password to a specific resource in your email if you wanted.
If you needed finer granularity over who could see what, then you could create additional roles and move users in and out of them as required (e.g. ‘Full Member’, ‘Temporary Member’ etc). In your case – given the need to email them – that would probably be a better bet than using Groups, because Groups doesn’t provide any means of emailing group members (although I believe and hope that it is on the author’s to-do list).
