Bob Spies shows the East Bay WordPress Meetup how to use the MemberPress plugin to protect online course content and why he chose MemberPress over the competition.

1. Protecting Video Course Content
A Simple Use of MemberPress
Bob Spies
Flying Seal Systems
bob@flyingsealsystems.com

2. The Application
• Site: theartoflivinginc.com
(career and life coaching).
• Two YouTube-hosted video
courses, each with its own
page.
• A free intro video for each
course.

3. Customer Flow:
• Customer views intro video.
• Customer begins subscription process:
• Customer fills out basic information and is taken
to PayPal.

4. Customer Flow (2):
•Customer is returned from PayPal to the
“thank you” page for the course in question.
• In future, s/he simply goes to the course page.
•If a customer goes directly to the Course page
and isn’t logged in, s/he is presented with
options.

5. Setup
•Membership Definition
• Description
• Price
• Registration thank you message

6. Setup (continued)
•Protection Rule
• Specifies content and which memberships can
access it.
• Message shown if someone without permission
attempts to access the content.

7. Setup (continued)
•Payment method(s)
• MemberPress supports
• PayPal
• Stripe
• Authorize.net

8. Why I Chose MemberPress
• Experience working with it on a prior project.
• Knew MemberPress was the most flexible of all the solutions
I had evaluated then.
• I had received excellent support.
• Needed ability for customer to purchase multiple
independent memberships.
• Chris Lema reviews.

9. Ease of Use
• Simple and straightforward, except for Payment setup.
• Payment documentation for PayPal was confusing, out-of-
date, incomplete, and in one case wrong.
• Gotcha: Setting things up so only MemberPress PayPal
customers are returned to the Video purchase thankyou
page.

10. Handling the After-PayPal Gotcha
• Set up PayPal to return customer to standard (non-video)
thank you page:
• Ignore the return URL specified by MemberPress:

11. Handling the After-PayPal Gotcha (2)
• Now non-video (non-MemberPress) customers will get
returned to the standard thank you page.
• Video customers will still get returned to the video thank
you page with text specific to the video course they have
purchased.
• (MemberPress will override the return page specified on
PayPal.)

12. What I Liked About MemberPress
• Clean, flexible architecture.
• “Rules”-based architecture doesn’t make limiting
assumptions as to how a Membership will be implemented.
• (From prior project) Actions and filters to handle any kind of
customization required.
• Easy to use, except for the Payment setup.
• Great technical support.

13. What I Didn’t Like About
MemberPress
• Relatively poor documentation.
• Not well organized.
• PayPal-related documentation out-of-date, uses different
terminology than PayPal does.
• Relies mostly on videos.
• Didn’t include handling the “other PayPal customers” Gotcha.
• Confusing PayPal setup Admin panel.