Building a Membership Site from Scratch – At No Cost
Previous Discussions
We began this journey in October when we looked at the available development environment services available. We settled on building our website using the InstaWP online WordPress development platform using the Kadence theme and its associated block plugins. We then migrated the website to a local environment using LocalWP by WP Engine.
In November we continued work on the Kadence site by restoring the site from a local backup, making changes using the Kadence block tools and creating a membership site using Paid Memberships Pro.
Kicking the journey off
Can we really get going with a public facing WordPress website for free? And make it look good? And offer some cool features? Yes. Watch and learn.
Adding Membership Capabilities
Membership levels permit us to segment content based on a variety of entities. Our example has a very simplified membership structure with a free tier and a single paid tier.
Today’s Topic:
Expanding the Membership Features of our building a site from scratch for free.
- Review site we built using Kadence theme, Kadence Blocks plugin, and Paid Memberships Pro plugin
- Review steps to set up payment gateway (using Stripe testing account)
Video Recording of Session
Resources Used in this Series
- Paid Memberships Pro – Content Restriction, User Registration, & Paid Subscriptions – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
- Setting up a Developer Account to Test Your Payment Gateway (paidmembershipspro.com)
- InstaWP
- Kadence website
- Kadence theme on wordpress.org
- Kadence Blocks plugin on wordpress.org
- Kadence Starter Templates on wordpress.org
- Kadence Local Site Build video
- Kadence Build using InstaWP video
- Kadence Pro
Featured Image Notes
The featured image on this post was also generated by Adobe AI, as was the previous two. I submitted this prompt to ChatGPT, and it provided a cool alternative to use for my drawing AI.
Initial Prompt: Imagine a scene in a grocery store cafe with a robot seated at a table. The robot has a laptop open in front of it, and its metal arms are extending toward the keyboard as if typing. The robot’s face has a surprised expression, with its eyes widened and maybe some visible electronic indicators to convey surprise. Meanwhile, the laptop screen could display a login page for the membership website.
Follow Up Prompt: Change the robot so that he is pumping his fist in celebration.
