How to Build a Membership Site with Restrict Content Pro

[Music] hey everybody my name is AJ Morris and I'm the product innovation and marketing manager here at I things I just wanted to take a quick moments of your time before we start this video on how to create a membership site with restrict content Pro now this video was done over on Facebook live I ran it last week during one of our Facebook live q and A's we didn't have anybody that really came in with any questions so I thought hey we're doing and talking about membership sites this week so let's just kind of look over my shoulders as I build out a site using restrict content Pro I was a fun video fun time with Facebook and what I wanted to do was just kind of give that to you over here on the YouTube channel so really what you're going to see is that video you're not going to get to see the comments or anything but you can always go over to Facebook to see it you could always watch it in a little bit better high def video content unfortunately when you download the video from Facebook they don't give you that high def video so you're gonna get a little bit of a grainy quality here I apologize for that in the future I'll try to remember to record the video locally so that I could also post it over here to YouTube but in either way I want to make sure that you get the content in whatever medium you are interacting with so that's why it's coming up over here on the YouTube page now if you are finding this video through a search engine or whatnot make sure you thumbs up like click the little bell in YouTube all those things to subscribe to our YouTube channel also head over to facebook.com forward slash ie themes that's ith Emes you can find us over there we're always talking about different content to really help you build a freelance business on top of WordPress so we're you know really grateful that you're here you're joining us and without further ado check out this video and how to create a membership site with restrict content pro so we're gonna go ahead and get started here and in this video I'm gonna be talking about restrict content Pro and setting up a site using restrict content Pro for your membership site so there's a couple of things that you need to be aware of let me log out of here a second and I want to show you kind of a breakdown of price of what what does a membership site cost you when you start thinking about building one the first thing that you need to have is hosting so you know there's there's plenty of hosts out there here at I themes we have our own hosting solution so you can go to items calm forward-slash WordPress hosting and check out our hosting plans down here through April 30th you can even save 30% off so that's a good savings for you and if you're just getting started you don't have any sites this to site plan is a good plan to get you started especially not knowing you know how many customers or how many members you're going to have on your site and so you can you can get this for as little as 11 dollars per month right now so once you have hosting you can kind of check that off the list you're going to be at 11 dollars a month for hosting with us that said there's there's plenty of other places to get hosting you don't have to use I themes for hosting but I will tell you that when you you do purchase ithemes hosting you also get backup buddy and i themes security Pro as well so you really get a full-featured host there so $11 per month right now and you're going to be able to walk away with with hosting looking at the next item that you are going to want to purchase is a membership plug-in and today we're looking at restrict content Pro if you go over here to pricing they are going to start at $99 per year this is going to give you one site and a bunch of extra add-ons all of the extra add-ons are really to help you with you know different payment gateways different email marketing providers there's a few things like a job manager board or hooking into easy digital downloads but otherwise for the most part you're gonna you're going to see there's there's a number of free add-ons you can use if you go towards the professional plan or hey Adam how you doing if you go towards the professional plan you get a little bit more Pro add-ons you can go in and you can do things like group accounts so you could sell corporate accounts to your membership site you could drip out content those are two really big features that you get with the professional our ultimate license models custom redirects is really great you can use a custom redirect to kind of redirect your users to different spots depending on what membership level they have and so there's a number of other items in here you'll you'll get convertkit if you use convertkit activecampaign and and so forth so 499 dollars a year this is where I would recommend that you start is just getting that so you're talking to start a membership site right now you're at $99 a year for restrict content Pro and if you use I themes hosting you're at eleven dollars a month and you know some simple math there we can say 132 dollars roughly for hosting so there's there's your prices to create a membership site moving from there and I'm not going to go through this purchase process I already have a restrict content Pro license I purchased the the ultimate version a while back and so I have I have this installed we're going to go ahead and get into restrict content Pro here in a second but we really want to also look at themes and so for themes one of the places I look at especially to keep our costs down is free themes and my favorite to kind of go to free theme is Astra so we'll go ahead and install that and I'll show you why we're gonna do this one in a second but I need to also add a plug-in with Astra and we're gonna do a search for astrocytes so astrocytes there is a free plug-in that gives you a kind of a ready-made site that's pre-built ready to go all you could do is kind of import it into your site so you can see in terms of plugins that I'm installing so far I've got restrict content Pro installed and that's just at that point it's just installed and then I have this starter templates and this works with Astra so let's go take a look at starter templates and one thing that you'll see about Astra is is that they work with all of the page builders so if you're an element or person or beaver builder person you can pick one of those if you really want to use the new block editor aka Guttenberg you've got that as an option and then there's brizi and I've actually never used brizi so I can't even speak to how well or how bad you know good or bad it's indifferent to me I be BER builder and Gutenberg those are the two that I go for so I'm gonna head over to beaver builder and select that as my option now what the sites the starter sites does is it has selected beaver builder and so I can see all the templates that Astra has designed for beaver builder now the one thing I'm going to say is it's great to look at this and if you see this agency indication right here this is this is a paid premium template so they're trying to upsell you on there their product and it's totally acceptable and I appreciate their ability and the way that they do it here but but I'm trying to save us some money right and really try to save this at you know as as cheap as possible especially in the time of you know koban 19 and all of ours to hit home orders creating a membership site can be incredibly useful so I'm gonna go to all and I'm going to choose the free option down here to see what free option of sites I have to select and you can see you can see that they have a ton of options for you so if you look through these you can you can see what you know if you're not creating my website you might want to use Astra and these sites templates for something else that you're doing like a barber shop or an interior designer we're going to use this learn - Academy one though I really like the way that this is laid out from both a learning management system course system and even a membership site this this one is really great and it's free it does kind of take us some setup to get it off of learn - but we can we can go through and fix that so I want to go ahead and click import complete site it's gonna warn us and just say hey you need to have these learn - plugins installed and all we have to do is click skip import and I'm going to I don't think I have a previously imported site but if I do go ahead and delete that as well and then I want to install all of the customizer settings of content the widgets everything so I can get as much of this site as possible and what we're gonna do here is it's gonna install so it's going to go through it's going to say okay need beaver builder i need i think i think it needs a form plugin it's going to import all the content so all the images all the text it's going to import all of these colors and these page templates so depending on how fast your server is this could take a couple of minutes to ten minutes it's also installing WooCommerce and cart flows and I don't need those so we're going to clean up some stuff after we get this installed I mainly want to have a full a full working site and that's why I'm installing everything here in this step so looks like we're about sixty way sixty percent of the way through importing content so it's moving along pretty quickly here you all right so it's it's now imported we can we can view the site and you can see it it's all looks really nice there is a section right here that doesn't load because it's using learn - so we're gonna have to kind of solve and fix fix that same with my account it's also using some learn - items and we're not using learn - here so we will need to fix those as well so let's go back into the admin and let's turn some stuff off because we don't actually need everything that it installed we don't need cart flows and we don't need WooCommerce so we'll go ahead and deactivate those and then as good stewards of website building we're gonna go ahead and delete those plugins because we're not going to we have no intention of using them so that leaves us with the beaver builder plugin and we have the lite version the lite version is free this is available on wordpress.org which is why that got installed we have the light version of ultimate add-ons for beaver builder this is a plug-in that you'll notice a brainstorm force here and brainstorm force here so the same developer of the starter templates has their own beaver builder add-on so you can see that there and then you'll have WP forms light so a form plug-in and a lite version of it to really just kind of create a contact form for you if you already have some plugins and maybe you're not starting from scratch you you could you know deactivate WP forms light and put in your own form plug-in but if you're new and this is kind of your first foray into starting a site you can just you can use what you've got here so I really appreciate the way that the started let's work in really just kind of giving you a site built all right so there's a few things that we need to do with our our site to kind of fix fixings and pieces up and the first thing I want to do is I want to go to pages and show you that what was what was really nice about restrict content Pro when I installed it and I installed it before going live here just just because I didn't want to go through and activate it and put my license key in and go through all of that step I just was trying to make it a little bit faster but one of the things I did want to show you that restrict content pro does is it's going to pre install a number of pages and then it's going to assign those pages in to restrict content Pro so if you look at say this this welcome page if we click Edit for a moment you will see that it's got some text in here it's using the classic the classic block if we go back to the dashboard and we go over to like this account page your membership you will see it has a short code called subscription details and if you view this page it would show you know some table and it would output some some information about your your membership what you know any invoices that you've had all of that well this is the same type of content that would have shown up on this miok help page so we can remove these learn - elements here these shortcodes and put in this shortcode so let me copy that when I go over here and this is a beaver builder page so we'll edit it with beaver builder and I'm not going to go through the tutorial or kind of a walkthrough on the beaver builder editor other than to just kind of say this is how you remove a module I want to edit this to this subscription details click Save you'll see that that comes out and that's all right here so we're going to go ahead and say done and publish and now when you click on my account that content shows up so the last thing that we need to do is go back out here and you'll see how this has like an account page we need to go in to restrict content Pro we need to go to settings and if I scroll down to try to get rid of my license key a second I need to just read show where my life my account page is so our account page is actually that my account that's the one I just made that change to so we'll go ahead and update that now I could go ahead and update some of these other ones as well but I don't need to that the main one that I wanted to do especially with the way that this site is built is the my account is kind of where you would see this data so all I want to do is worry about that one right now so we're gonna go ahead and click Save options and our options are now saved so let's go back to the home page on the front end here and we had one more learn - short code that we needed to remove so we can remove this and before we remove this I want to put a pricing table in here and that is to also change kind of courses to membership so again we can use beaver builder and go in here load this up I'm going to change view courses to view membership and we'll just leave it at that but you could put a link if you had a specific page or if you wanted it to kind of you click on this and it Scrolls down to this section here you could have it scroll right so we could we could do that I'm not going to in this but but if you do have questions on that let me know so view or sorry I'll say our most popular membership we'll leave all the lorem ipsum text in there just for the fun of it now before I remove this I want to add a pricing table here so I'm going to click on this plus icon and we are going to put in a pricing table so let's see what we have do we have a pricing table with the free version we do not all right just so we don't have it with standard modules let's try the you a BB one and it looks like we don't have pricing there either so I guess what we'll do is we'll build our own this will be a fun experiment so we're going to use the UAB B modules and I'm going to give it I'm actually going to do it a little bit different so I'm going to add a button I'm going to add a button right underneath this section and I'm going to I'm gonna say join now and we're gonna have to put a link in here but I'll I'll show you what that link is in a few moments I do want to change the style though because I don't like the grey on grey so I want to use the blue as a background color we'll see if they put it in here so they have added the color so we can do either the dark or a light I'm going to use the lighter I think that probably looks okay we need to add the text color to white so we'll go ahead and do that we need to add a hover so hover I'll go ahead and do that dark the darker blue there and the hover color will make white with a set that listen case something else about the theme doesn't like that so we've got that all set up and I'm good with where that's at I'm good to delete this now so go ahead and remove it and we need to add a price because we kind of needed we need to talk about this section and really show out what the price is for it so I'm going to add a heading I'm going to add it between the text and the button and we'll just call it 99 will remove some of the margin on the bottom and I'll kind of shrink up actually we'll just get rid of it on the top as well I guess a teach three works this isn't going to be very semantic but it works for what I'm trying to do we will go ahead and give it a size of like 45 that looks good and what wouldn't save it so the last thing I want to do is look here and probably get rid of some space he never is really trying to get those really close together that works I might also make the text be a little bit bigger so if you go to typography and font then go to size 22 X 22 looks ok so there's that well got and click done and we've got the basic layout and a kind of the basic process going I need to remove all courses from this area and to do that we can go into the dashboard so let me go into dashboard go to appearance and menus and we'll just go ahead and remove the all courses page so we remove that and now we're kind of looking a little bit better alright so now we can get into restrict content Pro and the first thing that we need to do is we need to go to settings and we need to go to payments now I've already set this up I'm just going to kind of walk through this but when you install restrict content Pro and you're just installing that you're going to have a number of gateways kind of built into cult the core of restrict content Pro so you can use the PayPal standard Express or pro options you could use stripe to check out or Braintree I've gone ahead and set up my stripe account and I'm using the sandbox mode so that I could if I wanted to try to purchase this membership towards the end of the video we'll see how far we get so that's that's kind of where that is going you also have a number of options down here so you've got your stripe settings you have your PayPal settings so these are all API keys and usernames and passwords and signatures that you need to go through an ad this is not covering that there's plenty of documentation links you can click on this for example and see what you need to do to set up your PayPal sandbox account and even set up other payment gateways as you go through it so restrict content Pro does have a ton of documentation and really walks you through the step-by-step process of how to do some of those so you have all of that you've got your Braintree you can save your options when you're good to go I want to walk through a few more settings really quick with you so you have you have emails and there is a option for plain text only emails or you can do a default template the default template looks pretty good you can give it a header you can update your logo you can put your from name your email you can also add an admin notification email so typically those are probably going to be not the same they could be the same but but you might put something like you know we use updates at ithemes comm as our email that we send out all of our email marketing from you could use something you know invoices or receipts or something like that as well and you do want to make sure that if you are using an email address here that it's actually a valid email address years ago people would say oh don't worry about putting a valid email on there but people reply more often than you think to your emails especially your invoice emails and your receipt emails and so you really want to have that be a valid email address so if you don't know how to create email addresses especially on your own domain but maybe you have one set up it might be worthwhile just leaving this don't this email as the email that you have so I'm gonna leave those both the from email and the admin notification email because this is the email I use primarily if you want the email verification on you can turn this on and basically what this does is is you send out a verification email before you can give access to a customer or a new member to the site so if you want something like that you can turn this on otherwise you know you can you can do verification I'm going to leave this off just because I want to kind of fly through it you have a ton of template tags take a look through those to see what tags you can use in emails and then you have all of your emails so you're paid membership activation email is right here you've got a few options for it basically your subject and your body and then you can send or preview an email so if you want to preview it this is what its gonna look like if you upload a logo and you add and make some change settings like this and this these will get updated I'm not going through and updating anything but it would show in there so you've got all of your emails in here read through these and see what they are you can disable admin notifications or you can disable that email altogether this is a free membership activation email for example trial and so forth so tons of emails in here you can even set up reminder renewal reminder emails by default there's one but you could add other reminders that go out here's a payment received email and a renewal failed email so those are your emails and that's where you can set those all up you do have invoices that go out so you can update and include your logo and all that contact information for your invoices right here and then under miscellaneous there's some extra extra things with like do you want a hide restricted posts from from queries so that it doesn't affect RSS feeds if you're doing any type of maybe private blogging or membership blogging you do have that as an option and then you've got a couple other options to redirect the default login URL you can also add Auto add users to a level I ignore this the section for the most part because it's it's not set up yet and so we can't actually do anything here you do have this is this is probably the most important one think of Netflix or Hulu for example when you buy Netflix or Hulu you only get so many simultaneous connections as you're sitting in your house right now you probably have a couple of kids trying to watch Netflix or Hulu and if you are trying to watch it and you're all trying to watch something different and you get a little error message that's simultaneous connections and so what you can do with your membership is you can set up the number of connections simultaneous connections that a member can have so if you don't want you know to have an account be shared among 20 people or 30 people you can you can put a number in here so you could say you know two this way it works with like a simultaneous connection and your laptop and maybe your tablet or something like that or you could just do one and and it's one connection per member if you don't want to limit that though you want to leave it unlimited you can leave it at zero in in most of the membership sites I've created with restrict content pro I've left it at one so I'm gonna go ahead and set it to one here you do have the option to disable the toolbar disable form CSS this is checked typically by default and this this allows the forum to then be styled by your theme you can add an agree to terms checkbox to your registration form and you can set the label you can even set the link to you know your terms page or your privacy policy so these two sections here are going to be four terms and Privacy Policy you have a reCAPTCHA setting and then you've got got debug mode and beta versions and a way to uninstall everything that restrict content Pro does when you uninstall restriction 10 Pro so those are the settings pretty simple pretty hopefully self-explanatory in most of those and at this point we're ready to start creating what we call membership levels so if you go over to membership levels you're gonna see a table and this is where your membership levels would show up if you have any we don't have any yet so we have to add one and we'll go ahead and add a simple level we'll just call it gold and we can give it a description the only level we're offering today hopefully something better than what I'm putting in here but you get the point this access level to be honest I have never used this never understood this so I'm just going to leave it as none it's essentially just 1 through 10 and there's a way to set things up accordingly now check out the bubble if you want more information you do need to set a duration for your membership so typically I set them for one year and they renew by default so you can leave maximum renewals are until cancelled if you wanted to offer a trial period you do have that option right here so you can set the free trial duration to say maybe it's 14 days or 10 days or five days or whatever you can fill that out you even have the ability to do months in year so if you really wanted to be gracious and do a full three-year trial you have that as an option then you set the price so we set our price earlier at $99 so we're going to go ahead and put that in here if you want to charge a sign-up fee certain membership models might have a sign-up fee so you could put that in here so yeah a $25.00 membership fee or a one-time you know $250 fee or something you could put that in and it would charge accordingly the sign-up fee would also only only do it on that first billing cycle so it would charge the 250 plus the 99 to get you your total then it's going to go ahead and go away on the subsequent charges I'll just be the 99 you have a status so you want it to be active since it's our first one that we're creating however you could maybe you change membership model plans or maybe you change plans all together you could it make a status be inactive you still have the membership level around but but you might make it go inactive so that's why there's a status option then the final thing is setting a user role this is can the WordPress role that you have so unfortunately the customer and shop manager roles existed now because I installed WooCommerce but subscriber in in nine nine out of ten instances is going to be perfect for you so you can just leave that there I'll go ahead and click add membership level now and you'll see our membership level has been added you can add multiple levels so you could add like a VIP level or something like that as well if that was something that that you wanted to do I'm just doing one today in this in this kind of webinar or this Facebook live so we'll leave it at that the next thing that we want to do is we want to set up our page ages to be restricted access most most of the time when I'm doing a membership site and in this case this the site is a simple you either have access or you don't I want it to default to you don't have access to something and so you have that ability right here under pages and restrict access you can say you can select who should have access to this content so members of specific membership levels so we want to say gold and require members to have capabilities from this user role I'll just leave that as any and basically now what happens is I'm logged in so it's still going to show this this page for example still shows let me see if there is a way in facebook live to show an inactive or to switch my screen it does not look like it let's see it doesn't allow me to show it but if you happen to access that page you will see a little error message up at the top this is sorry but you need to purchase a membership plan to access the content and so what we need to do is we need to go in here to edit page because we do want people to access this page you need to scroll down here and we want to change the restriction of a page and we have a couple of options here we can go into additional options where we show show excerpt to members without access to this content or we can remove the default setting that I changed so we'll go ahead and do that and we'll just say everyone and we can go back and restrict content a little bit differently so this is early morning for me so I apologize going to my notes here I ran the wrong way so if we want to protect a page which is really what we're trying to do we're going to go to add new this is now called a protected page scroll down and we're going to block it they have to have a membership level of gold or we could just say any membership level and we publish this we will see this here but if you happen to go to a protected page in if you go to it on your browser you should be okay if I go to it in an incognito window I basically get a little text right here that just says sorry but you need to purchase a membership plan to access the content that's what we want right is we're trying to block if somebody were to use this URL and give it to Adam or whoever else is watching right I don't want them to have access to the page I want them to create an account and be in sign up for a membership all right so that's how we start to restrict pages you can do posts as well you can do custom post types so if you if you create a custom post type in here or you do something else you know where you want to restrict content and respects s2 membership levels you can go in you'll see that here under posts and restrict access same as pages and restrict access it's not going to do comments or forms but it will do other custom post types so that's how you restrict content the last thing that we need to do is we need to link up our join Now button with a link to to register for an account so if we go back to our admin and we go down to restrict and we go to membership levels we need to make note of this ID and you'll see it says ID - okay so now that it says ID - we're going to remember that we're going to go over to the documentation I want to show you where this is at so you can reference this later if we type in short codes you we're going to get all sorts of shortcode options right and if you go down to creating membership levels there should be a shortcode looks like they've moved it right I mean one second to find it we can use the register form a shortcode with stripe but if we go to short codes here this is a better option for us so we want a registration form and we need this we need to make note of that ID so we're going to copy this and we're going to also make note that we need to add the ID here and we can do that on our registration page so here's our register page if we edit this we'll see that we already have that registration form so we could just add ID equals two because we're only going to offer one membership plan membership level so we can update that once we've updated it I'm going to copy this link address and on the front end we're going to now join and get into beaver builder here scroll on down I'm gonna go to to the general we're going to take that link we're going to paste in what we just copied which is that register page Oh God and click Save go ahead and also do that up here on this view membership and we'll just we'll just link both of these buttons to the registration page we'll click done we'll click publish and now when we click on one we're gonna get into a registration page so this piece right here is just saying that this is we're in test mode so you can use this card to go through and fill this out but you will see that you you kind of have everything created we had a 14-day trial so nothing is due today but in 14 days we're gonna get charged that 99 dollar fee so you can go ahead and fill this out I'm logged in so let's log out and look at this because the forum is going to change so the forum is going to have hey here's some username email for some last name personal contact information you need to fill out you're going to then see your data right here of what you're purchasing and then you can see the card and the credit card information so this is that form it doesn't look super great right now right because the theme is set up for learn - so we would need to go in and maybe put some CSS in here just to kind of make this look a little bit better let's actually do a test and let me see if I can get back in we're going to go ahead and make a a change to restrict content Pro so we're gonna go to settings and I think it was under miscellaneous there was an option to yeah to disable form CSS so we're going to uncheck this we're going to save our options and then let's log out so now if i refresh we get a little bit better of a form we don't have this I don't have a board weird border and kind of things on there this is still a table that still shows okay and the credit card looks a little bit better we're going to want to probably put some more CSS to this but for now this works so we could go in fill out a username you you I'm going to care about too much about the power we'll just fill it in we need to do this so card number you you we could if you're using LastPass at this point you could add your username and password them and ignore that go ahead and click register this is going to go and fingers crossed that I set up stripe correctly there we go so now we are logged in click not now I don't worry about that so this is the welcome page we can put whatever content we want here but if you click on my account you will see that you now have a gold membership it's active it's good until April 24th the reason it's the 24th is because I'm currently in that 14-day trial window I could cancel my membership or update my payment method so if I wanted to update that I could come in here and add a new card so there's all that capability already in here to do and you know now I'm ready to go right I could go and access pages that are our membership only pages and that's really where I want to stop because everything else gets very specific into the type of membership site that you're creating so since we have a few people on live Facebook live right now what questions do you have about restrict content Pro did you like this did you not like this was it easy to use those herbs those are my starting questions I have for you but let me know what questions you have you any questions no not seen any yet but I know it does take a few moments to kind of pop up on my side so I'm giving you a few seconds here one of the reasons I really like restrict content Pro is it was it's built by a developer it's built for developers there's a ton of hooks and filters and and all of that that you can add in to really kind of customize RCP to your liking it's it's great in that there's there's a number of add-ons that you can use I didn't want to get into covering any of the add-ons but but some things that I would probably add to RCP and definitely get in on the backend would be things like adding in an email marketing solutions of sending customers over to MailChimp or you know Minda active campaign or convertkit depending on what you're using I know some people really like authorize.net so you could always add the authorized.net add-on and use that as a payment gateway RCP has a really good integration with MailChimp that's when I ever having used MailChimp for years and that's what we use here at high themes and so you can always use use that to really connect to your store RCPS MailChimp pro version which which is available in it's available in the professional or ultimate professional or ultimate versions the pro add-on you do get capabilities where you can see what people purchase and it reports back into MailChimp so that's really handy useful information on that site as well so all right well I'm not seeing any questions the last thing I wanted to show really quick was just a discount was the ability ability to add a discount if you wanted to so go ahead and log back in and if you go to restrict down here and your go to discount codes you can add your your discount code so you can give it a name so the name would be like thirty five percent off running through April 30th and then this is the code so you could just say 35 off or off you want to give it a type of percentage since I'm already going that route of 35 percent off but you could do a flat amount some percentage we'll say 35 do you want it to be a one-time or do you want it to be all the time if it is a one-time a one-time discount you can't use you can't use it with a free trial discount so so that is that is kind of a downfall to the one time you then have your membership levels so you can limit if you have multiple membership levels available on your site you could limit a discount to certain membership levels you can set an expiration date and then the max number of times a discount could be used so that's kind of gets you how you can create discount codes and that is is really where I want to end so with that I thank you for joining me the folks that did join it looks like we've got two people left I think at one time I saw seven so great glad to see you join watch the replay if you have questions shoot shoot comment on the video and I will get back to you so thanks for watching thanks for being here and we'll see you potentially this afternoon [Music] you

Channel: iThemes

Views: 5,890

Keywords: wordpress, ithemes

Id: b6TLUGE3bNs

Length: 55min 5sec (3305 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020