Drip-Feed Your Content with the WPMU DEV Membership Plugin

Dieting is big business. And what better way to create a dieting website than to drip feed content (pardon the pun!)? Summer is coming and people are thinking about how to get trim for the beach. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create a dieting website in which content is drip fed to the subscriber over a period of six weeks.

It’s a fairly simple setup but you can add as many layers as complexity as you need for your own drip fed website. It’s also easily adaptable to any type of content.

We want the member to sign up for the website and start at week 1 of the process. Then they drop to week 2, week 3, week 4…. You get the idea.

The difference between this and scheduling the content to appear at certain times is that the content is relative to the subscription, not to a date. That means that whoever signs up will start at week 1 and move through the content, no matter when they sign up.

Let’s get started:

1. Install WordPress & Membership Plugin

Get WordPress here, get the Membership Plugin here. Install :)

You’ll also need to choose a nice theme. Since I’m making a lady-orientated site I’m using Lightness from Allure Themes.

2. Plan, plan, plan

I think I said this before somewhere once but I will say it again: the most important part of  setting up your Membership plugin process is planning. Forgo the planning stage at your peril!

I’m going to keep this simple and have only one subscription type for my “Get Thin While Eating Chocolate Pies for 6 Weeks” Dieting Website.

• Dieter – For a subscription they receive 6 weeks of drip fed content. At the end their prize is a super-flat stomach. I’ll make a lovely progress page where the Member gets awarded a star for each week completed – I is nice.

You could make this as complex as you want. You might want to include different plans that people can sign up for dependent on the percentage of their body weight that they want to lose. Or perhaps you could have plans for longer term, slow weight loss as opposed to a quick-and-dirty-chocolate-pie diet.

3. Decide on your content

I want a few different types of content:

1. Teaser Content (for people who haven’t signed up)
2. 6 Weeks of Dieting Content
3. Progress page with a star for each week completed (using shortcodes)
4. Menus – I want different menu items depending on whether someone has just landed or whether they have actually signed up

4. Create Your Content

a) Pages

To keep it simple I’m going to use pages for most of the content delivery.

Here are the pages that I have created:

You can see that I’ve created a signup page and no access page. These are very important so make sure you include them.

On the Signup Page you need to add the following shortcode: [subscriptionform]

On the Account Information Page add the following shortcode: [accountform]

Then go to Membership>Edit Options and scroll down to “Registration Page.” Select your sign up page:

Scroll down to “Account Page.” Select your account page:

Scroll down to “Protected Content Page.” Select your No Access Page:

Save!

Note – Remember that you need to set up a static page for your front page. To do this you need to go to Settings > Reading and select your static front page.

b) Shortcodes

I am going to create a progress page. On that page I want to reveal information about what the member has covered in the previous week as well as giving them a star at the end of each week. Therefore I need 6 shortcodes – one for each level completed.

To add your shortcodes go to Membership > Edit Options and scroll down to “Shortcode Protected Content.”

Add one per line and set them up like this:

Make sure that you set the shortcode visibility default to “no.”

Save!

c) Menus

I want to create a theme menu. When we create our levels we can decide who gets access to what in the menus. Go to Appearance >Menus (NB: You need to be using a menu with WordPress 3.0+ Menu Support).

Here’s mine:

Don’t forget to select it!

5. Create Your Levels

Although I have only one subscription type I’m going to have eight membership levels. They will be:

• Visitor – teaser information that a visitor gets when they arrive at the site
• Level 1 – Week 1 diet information
• Level 2 – Week 2 diet information
• Level 3 – Week 3 diet information
• Level 4 – Week 4 diet information
• Level 5 – Week 5 diet information
• Level 6 – Week 6 diet information
• Completion

It takes a bit of setting up but the results are definitely worth it!

Go to Membership > Edit Levels

Click Add New from the right hand side:

Note that there are both positive and negative rules. You can decide what people can have access to and what they are barred from seeing.

To add a rule just drag and drop from the right hand side to the place that you need it. Just like widgets!

Visitor

Add your level name:

Positive Rules

We only want them to have access to the Welcome and Sign Up Pages. You’ll find the “Pages” rule under “Main Rules” on the right hand side of the screen:

Drag this to positive rules and Select “Welcome” and “Sign Up”:

Negative Rules

We want to exclude them from all of the Menu items. Find “Menu “ under the “Main Rules” on the right hand side.

Drag it to negative rules:

This will exclude visitors to the site from all of these menu items.

Scroll to the bottom and select “Add” at the bottom of the page.

Level 1

Positive Rules

This time we want to give them access to much more content. As before, drag “Pages” over to positive rules:

As you can see, we don’t need to give them access to the sign up page but they do need access to areas such as Account Information and Progress.

Negative Rules

Again, drag “Menu” to negative. We want to exclude Level 1 Membership from all the weeks except week 1. We should also exclude the Sign Up page as well as these Members have already signed up:

Level 2

Positive Rules

As before, drag over “Pages”, this time adding “Week 2” in addition to the other rules:

We’re also going to add shortcodes to this level and the subsequent ones. On the progress page I want content to appear with includes a review of the previous week’s content.

Under “Content Rules” find “Shortcodes”:

Drag that to the positive rules:

I’m selecting “Level 1” as the content revealed is a review of the level 1 content.

Negative Rules

Drag “Menu” over again and select the items that you want to exclude for this level:

Level 3

Positive Rules

Drag “Pages” over, this time adding Week 3 in addition to the other rules:

I think you can see a pattern forming!

Drag Shortcodes over to positive rules and select Level 1 and Level 2:

Negative Rules

Drag “Menu” to negative rules and make sure you have checked Sign up, Week 4, Week 5 and Week 6:

Level 4

I think you get the idea.

Positive

• Pages: Your Delicious Diet, Account Information, Week 1, Week 2, Week3, Week 4, Your Progress, Welcome
• Shortcodes: Level 1, Level 2, Level 3

Negative

• Menu: Sign Up, Week 5, Week 6

Level 5

Positive

• Pages: Your Delicious Diet, Account Information, Week 1, Week 2, Week3, Week 4, Week 5, Your Progress, Welcome
• Shortcodes: Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Level 4

Negative

• Menu: Sign Up, Week 6

Level 6

Positive

• Pages: Your Delicious Diet, Account Information, Week 1, Week 2, Week3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Your Progress, Welcome
• Shortcodes: Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, Level 5

Negative

• Menu: Sign Up

Completion

This is pretty much the same as Level 6 but with just the last shortcode added.

Positive

• Pages: Your Delicious Diet, Account Information, Week 1, Week 2, Week3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Your Progress, Welcome
• Shortcodes: Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, Level 5, Level 6

Negative

• Menu: Sign Up

Phew! That took a long time. But all of that setting up will be worth it!

Before we move on we need to activate all of those levels. At the main level screen hover over the Level name to get the quick menu and select “Activate.”

You can also select all of the radio button and toggle activation from the dropdown menu.

6. Choose Your Stranger Level

Anyone who arrives on your site and who isn’t logged in is a stranger. By default they don’t have access to any information. However, we have created a Visitor membership level so that we can give visitors teaser information and encourage them to sign up. To use this membership level for your stranger go to Membership > Edit Options. The first section there is “Stranger Settings.”

Choose your Visitor level from the dropdown menu:

Save.

7. Create Your Membership

Now it’s time to create your subscription. We only need to create one subscription with seven levels.

Go to Membership > Edit Subscriptions and click “Add New”

Give your subscription a name and description:

Next you are going to drag and drop your levels over to the “Membership Levels” section. This will be the starting point. The subscriber drops down to the next level at a time that you determine. The options are:

• Finite: set period of time
• Indefinite: remain at the same level forever
• Serial: remain at this level but renew after a set period of time

Each of our levels is going to last for one week.

For the top level we want to charge $50. This will start the process of content delivery.

Drag Level 1 to the top level set the time period to Finite, 1 week and set the cost to $50:

Drag Level 2 underneath and set it for one week.

Drag Level 3 underneath and set for one week.

Drag the rest of the levels over in the correct order.

Finish with the Completion level. I’m going to give the subscriber access to that for one week. After that the subscription will finish and the user will have to sign up once more if they want to start the process again.

At the bottom click “Add”:

You need to both activate your subscription and make it public:

8. Choose Your Payment Gateway

Go to Membership > Edit Gateway

I’m going to choose Paypal – Single Payments as this is just a single payment sign up, not a subscription.

Fill in your details. You can change the buttons to your own designs:

Don’t forget to activate!

9. Enable!

Before your Membership Plugin works the protection needs to be enabled. This can be done from the Membership Dashboard. Click on Membership:

You can see that the plugin is disabled. Click on “Enable It”:

Open a new tab in your current browser and navigate to you website. You should the welcome page and your menu:

Open a different browser (i.e. if you’re using Firefox open Chrome or IE) and navigate to your website. You can see how the menu items are hidden from the  user who isn’t logged in:

10. Add Some Content

You need to add content to each of your pages. All of the delicious things that your dieters will be eating!

For now I’m going to show you the Progress page. This page will reveal content depending on what stage the subscription is at.

For example, at the end of Week 1 I want my subscribers to be able to read a review of what they have done and get a star for their progress.

I’m going to use shortcodes to hide the information and to reveal it each week. Check it out:

Save your page.

Here is the progress page at Week 2 of the subscription:

Here it the progress page at Week 4 of the subscription:

Pretty awesome, right?

Now you should be able to drip feed content for any type of content site. There are loads of possibilities for it:

• Training websites
• Dieting websites
• Fitness websites
• Information websites
• The sky’s the limit!

Go play!