I’ve added, and now fully tested a membership management system, on the Events Horizon Ltd website that I designed and produced.
In short it’s great to automate sign-up, payments and renewals for memberships to areas of sites. You can also use it to simply handle the membership only (no content).
The areas can have valuable content such as maps, hints & tips, tutorials, statistics, market research, etc. I will call these areas Protected Areas to help make things simple.
These Protected Areas are not accessible to non-members and if users try to access these Areas then they are asked to register or login if they are a member.
Registration Features
– You can add as many fields and types of form fields to the sign-up page (e.g. mobile tel, country, date of birth, etc)
– You can make some (or all) fields mandatory, so users registering have to enter the required fields.
– You can check registrations before making them live, after which users are sent their registration details. This helps to ‘vet’ registrations and also ensure that users use a valid email address to which their login details are sent.
Membership Features
– You can add and label as many different memberships to different Protected Areas that you want. Example, one membership may be to maps only, another to hints & tips and a third to both maps and hints & tips.
– You can set the duration of each membership in days, months or years. Example, you may have a trial membership for 1 week and a full membership for 1 year. When the duration o the membership expires, the user will not be able to access the Protected Areas until they renew their membership.
– You can set the time in days (before which membership expires) when an email is automatically sent to members to tell them that their membership is about to expire and to renew it.
– You can have free and paid memberships. Example: you may want to give a 7 days trail for free and a full year’s subscription for 1 year (paid).
Payment Features
– You can use quite a few online payment systems such as PayPal, Worldpay, NoChex, Authorize.net and many more, or you can simply do offline credit card processing or simply ask for cheques or cash. Whichever method you use, you simply do not activate a membership until it has been paid for (unless it’s free. Activation is a click of a two buttons on the user’s page.
Back End / Administration Features
– Browse and Search for Users (Paid and not Paid)
– Edit User Details.
– Add Users.
– Email Users (All, Membership Type, or depending on whether they’ve paid or not paid).
– Import partial or full User data from delimited files such as Comma Delimited
– Export partial or full User data to delimited files.
– Back and Restore the whole database.
– VIEW REPORTS
– View Payments by Date Range.
– View Statistics by any field you ask for on registration. Example: view stats of users by town – will show percentages next to each town.
– MEMBERSHIPS
– Edit Individual Membership details. Example: you may want to start charging for a previously free membership, or you may want to extend the duration of a membership.
– Add and Delete Memberships.
– You can Create Electronic Coupons for Offers: Example, you may want to offer a 25% discount over the Christmas period for new registrations for a specific Membership. You can generate a unique code and set the validity duration (e.g. one month from 1 Dec 2004) and number of uses (e.g. first 100 sing-ups). The system automatically manages the discounting and sign-ups.
OTHER DETAILS
– The system has much more depth which I haven’t gone into above otherwise this article would be huge. So if you have any question then please contact me.
– For you techies, the system uses PHP and a MySQL database.
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