Membership Sites are a hot item just now, with many people creating new sites to share information with their communities. There are many types of memberships and ways to create them. Some of the programs out on the market today can be terribly expensive and clunky to use. Many don’t allow a lot of custom work done on the site, so it’s hard to brand your Membership Site. While there isn’t (yet!) a perfect solution, a combination of WordPress and WishList is about as close as you can get!

Why WordPress + WishList?

First of all, WordPress is a free blogging platform that can do so much more. With all the themes, plugins, and training that is available online (and most of that is free as well!), a simple blog can be transformed into a very active and feature-rich website with photos, video, files, password-protected areas and memberships! There are even plugins to add forums, varied content, calendars and more! With such a flexible platform, there isn’t much that you can think of that you can’t do with a WordPress website.

WishList, while not free, is a very inexpensive option to the other membership management software solutions that are currently available. There is a one-time fee for the plugin, which means no recurring monthly fees. You can purchase a license to use on one site, or a multi-site license that would allow you to setup multiple Membership Sites. This “premium plugin” for WordPress can handle almost anything you throw at it and the developers are continuing to tweak it and add features. They’re even creating additional plugins to help you maximize your site! You can even link it directly to your shopping cart or autoresponder program, making your site appear seamless and perfect! It’s easy to install and since it is a premium plugin, the files are encrypted so you know you have a secure program.

Combining WordPress and WishList is a win-win situation for you and your members. While using this combination takes a little while to setup, the levels of customization make it worthwhile. Your members will feel right at home due to the branding you can use on your Membership Site. And it’s as easy to update your Membership Site as it is to post to your blog!

Bonus Tip: WishList has a great affiliate program, so if your members like the setup of your site, you could earn your money back in no time!

And now I would like to invite you to claim your Free Instant Access to my 45-minute audio recording, “What Is a Membership Site and Why Do I Need One?”when you visit http://www.MyFabulousVA.com.

From Rebekah Zobel Jones, Membership Site Creator, Coordinator, and Consultant and the My Fabulous VA Team.

Even though the title of this article says that Drupal is a content management system, it goes way beyond the typical features of a standard CMS. Drupal is so incredibly flexible that the title content management framework is more fitting. Since I’ll be doing a series of articles on Drupal, I’ll focus on one aspect starting off with nodes – core pieces of a content base.

Nodes

At first reading about a node, just the name might sound vague and confusing. Don’t let that fool you, nodes are your best friend when using Drupal. Think of a node as a grouping of data pieces such as news items, blog posts, pictures or songs. A node without any extensions has a few basic things – creation date, title, text body and author. You can assign taxonomy or categories as well by default.

Content Types

When understanding Drupal, it’s very important to grasp the idea of generalized foundations in which many different types of applications can be built on. This is why at the core of a node, it’s very simple and basic. But when you add on more fields such as file uploads, date fields, link fields, you can see how nodes suddenly become much more. Content types are more like ‘node types’ – this is where you define what makes these nodes special, and what fields and attributes they have.

Extending Nodes

This can be as easy as downloading CCK modules, copying them into the modules folder and checking the box so Drupal recognizes them. CCK stands for content creation kit, and pretty much any field you will need has already been created. Fields are not limited to only one item, you can customize the field in your Content Type settings and do things like require the field to be filled in, or allow the end user to upload as many images as they like.

Display

Displaying the data that nodes contain is incredibly easy using the built in features of Drupal. The default install will list items on the home page that have been marked as ‘promoted to the front page’. Using Views, you can build pages simply by clicking a few things to choose which nodes you’d like displayed. Choose layout, items to show, paging controls, filter and order. Set a page path and Drupal does the rest.

What if don’t like how that is displayed? You can do theme overrides and template files to show the data in alternative formats. Since Drupal is open-source and the community is so large and helpful, building your own custom module to display the data is not far out of reach for mid level php programmers.

Miles has been writing blogs and articles for the past few years. Some of his hobbies include playing the drums, drawing, and singing in a band. In addition, he builds informational websites. Check out one of his latest sites at http://www.antiquesideboard.org where he provides some great information on Antique Sideboards.

When first seeing the word taxonomy, you might think of science and mounted animal skins on the wall. That’s because the closely related word Taxidermy, meaning the reproduction or mounting of dead animals for display, has its roots in Greek as well. Taxonomy is the method and practice of classifying things based on their natural relationships, and in the Drupal world it does just that – organizes data nodes.

The structure of Drupal taxonomy starts off with top level ‘Vocabularies’ each which can contain terms, and sub-terms. An example of this would be the Vocabulary word guitar. A few of the terms for this would be acoustic, electric, or bass guitar. Under the acoustic term, there could be additional terms such as twelve string, or spanish style. There is no limit to the amount of terms that can be used or nested.

Terms are usually inserted by site administrators from the Taxonomy module within the Drupal admin area, but it is possible to enable regular users to create terms, and this is known as Folk Taxonomy. This is based on naming items from the vernacular, namely non-scientific names. In the Drupal world, this is known simply as making tags. Tag clouds are popular amongst blog sites and allow users to categorize their content using single words or phrases that help make it easier for other people to find the item.

In addition to nesting and hierarchical organization, Vocabularies can allow its terms to have related terms, making it easier for similar content to be found by the linkage.

Lets take an example of an article about a performance honoring Cinco De Mayo which features a group playing guitars. The article could be placed into the guitar, acoustic, as well as the spanish style terms. Additionally, another top level Vocabulary titled Holidays could be referenced from another angle which ties the article in based on the other aspects of it. Terms under that Vocabulary could be titled regional holidays, ancestral holidays, or mexican holidays.

By using these robust categorization tools, Drupal nodes can placed into many different areas and classified in the necessary ways to keep content organized.

Miles has been writing blogs and articles for the past few years. Some of his hobbies include playing the drums, drawing, and singing in a band. In addition, he builds informational websites. Check out one of his latest sites at http://www.antiquesideboard.org where he provides some great information on Antique Sideboards.