Setting up a members area

Question

I am trying to set-up a members area on a site, I have already come up with one solution but was wondering if anyone one knows of an easier or better way to go about it. The problem is the user doesn’t log into WordPress, they are sent to a separate product for bookings and such.

The way I have accomplished this is having two separate themes the guest theme, which blocks all category posts aside from one and only has links to a couple of specific pages and the members theme has access to everything. Once a user logs into the separate product all the links link back with a theme switch using (site.com/?wptheme=memberstheme) with a one hour time limit which resets to the guest theme, thus logging them out after one hour.

Is there a better way to go about accomplishing this?? or a good plugin??

Thanks

Answer 1

I'm in the process of establishing a members site. You can find a bunch of premium plugins to pay for...and a few free ones like s2member, Membership lite or Members. I decided to go with Members and write everything else i need (like paypal integration and so on) myself.

Answer 2

I think you could try to use buddypress an excellent plugin to perform a community with your wordpress.