Wanted: Membership Directory via WordPress!

Why: Thought I would take a few minutes this morning and follow a project I have been putting off since August — they best kind of project to put off, one you aren’t getting paid for. I have an organization that is non-profit in nature and I am on the board. We have a members’ only wordpress install, so it may only make sense to extend it to cover our membership directory. In the past, we have done our directory in print … so it is outdated quickly and expensive to re-publish annually. My copy that is now two years old is heavily annotated with updated email addresses and so forth.

Why Now: We are about to send out dues notices, wouldn’t it be great if we had this in place at the same time and emailed people a notice about this at the same time.

So here goes nothing — and what the heck I’ll take you along for the ride (like so many rides this one has a surprise ending if you want to skip the flow and jump ahead … but this makes for a great example of project flow and research leading to conclusions) — this is a pretty typical project for us as we are VERY comfortable working in wordpress even though we have never bothered/had need for this particular project before. I will try to give you the “mental” sense of the flow of a project like this including the various side shoots a project typically takes. This is simply part of the process of most “new” types of projects.

Research:

• Like all good projects, let us start with a google search. For the briefest of time I tried Bing as a replacement … it just didn’t do it for me — so here we are, back to google.
• First hit looks like a fairly decent solution … “How to Use WordPress as a Membership Directory” however it also raises a few new questions …
  • of course this is an older install of wordpress — I just told you it is an unpaid volunteer situation, so I probably have to update to the newest version first — shouldn’t take too long I suppose
  • The tutorial only talks about 2.5x and of course as of today we are in the second or third week of 2.9 (hallelujah for quick update buttons [and self-installing plug-ins] but still make your backups before doing so or you may be calling us in a panic to save your wordpress install … and we would rather work with you under different circumstances) so we need to wonder will it work okay with the current rendition and are the plug-ins still working well with the current version?
  • The posts end mysteriously in June (with the last three being unanswered) … always of concern when a thread stops suddenly … maybe it’s the post above that says if you want help hire me, which I can appreciate … but on the other hand he doesn’t update the post when someone proposes a better plug-in for one of the the two required functions at the bottom.
• The second hit is another place he wrote the same article … kind of funny to read through … someone offers to translate it to their language … but of course it’s a site offering adult advertisements … the things you put up with on the internet … but I figure I should at a minimum read the comments for a while to see what other discussion exists … and I come onto an interesting idea … “What do you think about using wordpress as a invoice manager? Each post could be an invoice that prints to pdf. possibly have it mail the pdf directly to clients. i’ve been toying around with the idea, but im not a savy enough programmer. i realize it would require modifying the WP core.” I think you could do that and what if you future published next invoices (I often invoice quarterly for example … ) and subscribe myself to the thread. Like the dogs in the movie UP — “squirrel!!” Good nugget there, but ignore it I have a project at hand. So back to reading the comments.
• So far most of those posts at WPDesigner border on inane, however the author in a response suggests a third plug-in to use for author photos: user photo. I see a different discussion on his site regarding photos and numbering them to match author id’s (that would be a project keeping them straight perhaps …). So file this one away on the main flow … three plug in’s now needed:
  1. WP User Manager plugin from Dealsway to add new fields to the user profiles. >> now replaced perhaps with: Register Plus a plugin that is represented as being cleaner and easier to work with for this purpose.
  2. The famous Role Manager plugin which restricts what your members can do once they are logged into your site.
  3. User Photo to allow upload of pictures. The author did this manually and then refers briefly to this plug in (that came into being after his initial install in his blog and he simply refers to it in comments at WPDesigner … so I presume it will work fine with a minor edit perhaps to the display pages.
  4. So on these three plugings, for now we’ll simply tuck away these three plugin’s and figure that an early step will be to see how compatible they are with 2.9 (assuming I will update before moving forward with the project … after all why do it twice, once now and once when I have to upgrade).
• Squirrel: WP needs a good nested ul/ol manager … it isn’t doing these nestings well at all … I’m manually doing them in essence … does this exist … back on task having made a mental note …
• Likoma has a version of member directories up an running in wp 2.1 and he is kind enough to offer a tutorial — he however forces you to watch a video to see how he does it — much better to describe first and then watch the video. His method used an alternate plugin. He uses the “UserExtra” plugin. I assume this is a alternate to either WP User Manager or Register Plus referenced above. I’ll make a note of it. (Squirrel: He uses something called “wink” to make his video tutorial. I often make video tutes with Jing (JingProject from http://techsmith.com). What is Wink? I love Jing, but Wink looks really really good … sorry some squirrels do get chased around here!) The UserExtra plugin appears to have a neat feature — the ability to restrict certain categories to certain levels of user.
• Next link is more questions than answers but it again references a plugin called user extra fields … same or different than above? Appears to be different based on screenshots, though may simply be a different version. Given the lack of info on whether it works with latest wordpress releases … wondering how common it’s use is these days?

I break right now to say … okay Chris … lame to write an update and not leave a message in the old thread saying … this may be obsolete because I have now written an update! Granted you don’t even have to share with us, but had I come upon your update first and read the rest historically well … it would have been smoother and perhaps saved me some time.

So now let’s start over with your update:

The New & Improved Way to Turn WordPress 2.7 into a Membership Community

Gee I wish this came up higher in the google search (Squirrel: let’s try Bing just for kicks … remember my start … and remember I’m leaving my flow “as it happened” with the exception of the jump link near the top — in fact google may be better in this instance as I now see the tenth link on the first page of finds to be: WP 2.5 Update: How to Use WordPress as a Membership Directory). Of course I more or less did the links in order … so I somehow came to the 2.7 update before the 2.5 update … but now I wonder is there a category or other way to see your whole series of posts. May I suggest that you start at the oldest and put an indexed list on the latest and a link to that list at the top of each such post? It would be good for you and for your search engine find-ability I suspect as well. Now one could argue I should have done a better job of scanning my first few google finds, but frankly the top couple of posts looked very promising — and they were great starts or I would have skipped over them entirely — but in the end you could have helped both yourself and myself with a couple of choice links forward.

So let’s now read 2.5 … to stay in order and then 2.7.

WP 2.5 Update: How to Use WordPress as a Membership Directory

This will be a quick read … maybe even a skim because I know 2.7 is coming and 2.7 may well be sufficiently close to 2.9 so that I may be good to go … so let’s skim.

Okay in fact it was a quick read and the post actually gets us all the way to 2.7 … here is a distilled version of plugins he lists:

So after doing all the typical database backups, I started the process. I first uploaded all the new versions of the plugins that I had been using:

* Article Templates – To pre-configure my “New Member” post templates
* GeneralStats – To show the number of members
* Improved Include Page – To insert the ads
* IWG Hide Dashboard – Removed
* Role Manager – To specify which a Subscriber or a Designer could do within the dashboard
* WP User Manager – The heart of the site

He did note a couple of issues between Hide Dashboard and Role Manager. I can live without hide dashboard, but I think I’d like to not enable/disable role manager regularly to update. That issue would cause me some concern, but let’s jump forward.

The New & Improved Way to Turn WordPress 2.7 into a Membership Community

Just for kicks I went to his website and viewed all of his public posts from this post going backwards to the first post I found. There are no posts in between on the subject, so I think I have it. So on to reading about 2.7 used as a membership directory.

He has decided to use these plugins:

* Register Plus
* New User Email Setup
* User Photo
* Customize Your Community
* Custom Author Permalink
* Show authors without posts
* WP-reCAPTCHA
* Audit Trail
* Role Manager
* WP Hide Dashboard
* WP Security Scan

As you can see, what started simple got complex — although I think you could get by with much less if you wished. The last five of these had to do with tightening security.

Anyway off to update my WordPress Install and then why not, I’ll give it a whirl!