Membership: Member Pages

Adding Membership pages gives you the ability to create member areas and restrict access based on whether a user is logged in to your site or not. Member pages are the heart of your Membership, and can be used for selling exclusive content, gathering leads and information on potential customers, and establishing a high-converting site.

In this document, we will look at the required pages that are added when you enable a Membership, show how to create additional pages (new and existing), use login buttons, and look at membership approval options.

Automatically Created Pages

Once you’ve installed the Membership app, you will find 3 new pages on your site: Pending page, Signup page and Access denied page. These can be found at the bottom of the pages menu. These pages are automatically created because they contain the required functions of new member signups.

Note that the pages you use as a member area are created manually and separately. This process is covered in the Adding New Member Pages and Converting Existing Pages to Member Pages sections below.

These pages are what your users will see when they sign up and access the Member area. Visit each page to customize the look and feel.

The sign in page is the single page used for member sign ups on the site regardless of number of restricted/members-only pages. This page contains a Sign Up widget by default and this must be set up.

To configure the sign up widget:

Select Pages from the left menu.
Scroll down to “Membership Pages.”
Click on the “Sign in page.”
Click on the sign up form on the page to open the Sign Up widget content and design editor.
Customize the following details:
- Sign up:

Make Sign up the default screen: enable this to ensure users see the sign up page when they first arrive on the page.

Title: enter the desired title to display above the form.

Google signup: enable this to allow sign up via Google.

Terms of Service: enable this to add Terms of Service and link to your appropriate policy or enter information in the text box. Read more about privacy pages here.

Make Log in the default screen: enable this to ensure users see the log in page when they first arrive on the page.

Login Title: enter the desired title to display above the form.

PENDING AND ACCESS DENIED PAGES

The Pending and Access Denied pages use standard text widgets to convey the required information. These pages can be styled as any other page on the site, and the full widget library is available for page design.

Adding New Member Pages

To create a new membership page:

Select Pages from the left menu.
To create a new page, select “+New Page.”
Click on the gear icon, and select “Set Access.”
Under “Set page access” select “Members only.” This will restrict this individual page to members only.
Define who will have access to this page by clicking “All signed up members,” or “Members who purchased a certain membership plan.”
Click the “Manage Memberships” link within the page access section, select “Membership Settings” and define how members will be approved. If you automatically approve requests, anyone who requests will be granted access and if you select the manual option, an individual will need to manually approve each individual request. Read more about approval options later in this doc.

Note: if you select manual approval, a user requesting access will see a pending page (see Pending and Access Denied Pages section above).

Converting Existing Pages to Member Pages

The area you designate as the “member area” of your site is totally up to you. If you would like to convert existing pages on your site to member pages, do the following:

In the Pages menu, click the gear icon and select “Set Access”
Select Members Only.
You will see additional options below. Use the radio buttons to select whether you want the page to be available to all members or member groups.
Pages with Membership access will be notated in the Pages menu with a member icon.
Repeat this process for all pages to be converted.
You can convert pages in the future as often as you like.

Notes on member pages:

When setting access, any sub-pages will not automatically be membership only pages. You must assign “Members only” access to each individual page.
The following pages are not supported: dynamic pages, store pages, and blog posts.

Once you have added the membership feature to your site, you can then add a Login widget which allows you to define which page members are directed to following login.

To add the login widget:

Select Widgets from the left menu.
Find the Login widget. Click and drag this widget to the desired location on the site.
Click on the widget to open the Content editor, scroll down to “Where should users redirect to after login?”
Click the drop down menu and choose the page you want visitors to be redirected to after login.
Ensure you publish/republish to push this change live.

Note: This widget will only work on a published site. You can test the process by visiting the preview link for the site (not the preview within the editor), click on a members-only page (the page must be accessible, i.e. found in the navigation or button). If you can access the page and aren’t asked to login, check your login widget again. If the problem persists, clear your cache or try incognito mode in your browser to test.

Manually Approved Memberships

You can choose between automatically approving memberships or manually approving them. With the manual option, new members must request access to membership pages, and these must be approved to give access. After requesting access, members will be redirected to a pending page letting them know their request was submitted.

To set up manually approved memberships:

Select Membership from the left menu.
Select “Membership Settings.”
Under “Member Approvals” click “Manually approve requests via email.”
You can decide who approves the requests (e.g. site owner) by clicking the link below to set who can approve.

Once this is set up, requests will be sent to the assigned individual(s) via email.

APPROVING MEMBERSHIP REQUESTS

A request for membership will be sent via email; to approve the request:

Select Membership from the left menu.
Select “Site Members.”
Locate the relevant member, click the settings icon and select “Approve Member.”