How to Build a Membership Site on WordPress from Scratch 

Let me know if you bump into any questions, Andy! Cheers! - Tony

Cool idea, jotting it down! Cheers! - Tony

Hi there! Good question. Well, you can have maybe a button on your header that says "Login/Logout" (and thrive architect can display one option or the other depending on whether someone is logged in or not). If they're not logged in... there are a couple of behavioral paths that you can enable: 1 - You create a login page with a simple login form and upon signing in you redirect them to your hub page. This is all 100% doable just with Thrive Architect alone. Probably the most time-efficient way since you've already created your customer hub page. 2 - You can put all of the content of your existing hub page inside a content box and enable a new default display (I'm using conditional display now) where, if the user is logged in, you reveal all of the content inside the hub page. And if they're not logged in, you show a sign in form and nothing else, forcing them to log in. And if they've successfully signed in, you can simply have Thrive Architect refresh the page for them, unlocking your display view which reveals all of the content inside your hub page. Let me know if this makes sense! 🙏🏻 - Tony

Hi there! Good news... I'm not using ANYTHING! You can now have Thrive Apprentice do most things for you! Here's how it works... With Thrive Apprentice you create products, these can consist of courses or access to specific areas of you site (pages, posts etc.). You can then have Thrive Apprentice talk directly to a payment processing system (in this video I'm using Thrivecart) so that when a user purchases a product inside Thrivecart, it automatically unlocks access to your Thrive Apprentice product (which, again, will contain perhaps a course, or access to some of your posts and pages). We're getting pretty close to the point where you won't need anything else other than Thrive Suite to power it all 💚🍃 - Tony

@@Thrivethemes are there any resources on the Thrive site about how to transition from a full membership plugin (member mouse etc) over to thrive only? I know this is an odd topic now that the same guy owns both of those companies! Ha! But I'd either like better Membermouse integration/simpler or I'd like to transition off MM over to Thrive only. I started using Thrive in 2017 I think... I'm not blowing smoke to anyone - it is THE BEST combo with wordpress to build anything on the internet. It is such an incredible software.

​@@TradeMaestro This doc may get you thinking about whether this is the right move for your or not: help.thrivethemes.com/en/articles/4949332-should-i-use-membermouse-with-thrive-apprentice You're still going to need a way of processing payments, which member mouse does for you pretty well. You may not need to kill the combo as they work pretty well together. How is your existing environment making things complicated for you? This could be a great discussion for us to take over to our FB group by the way (link in the description box).

@@Thrivethemes thanks. Kind of what I need. I probably need to go through the support portal to get the precise answer. Thanks for your time and your video.

Hi John, good question. Signing in is indeed simply having a subscribe form (you can create one using the lead generation widget of Thrive Architect) on your page and connecting it to WordPress. Being Pro Members is indeed different, this is handled by your payment processing system and Thrive Apprentice. There's a step in this video in which inside my thrive cart product I tell it to "add users to my membership site", which means that upon purchasing my product, users get an account created on my website with access to the product that they just purchased. Let me know if this helps! - Tony

@@ThrivethemesWhat I don't understand is where signing in applies from the perspective of the person who visits the site. I'm used to visiting a lot of sites, reading a lot of blogs and buying the occasional membership or class. I don't think I've ever been a user on a site or signed in as a user. What would entice me to do that, and switching sides, as the seller of a class or membership site, do I need to get users to sign in or can I just sell them memberships?

Hi Jorge! Technically speaking, if Thrivecart can't seem to process a payment for you from one of your customers, this leads to an automatic cancellation. Nevertheless, I'll raise this with our team to make sure there's nothing odd happening on our side. Cheers - Tony

@@Thrivethemes thank you Tony, as always. Amazing content and support :) . I have tried myself on different projects and sadly, when a payment fails, there’s no automatic cancellation. I’ll keep an eye on any update on this 🫣 (I have already make a vote for this to the support team) 🥰

Hey Pat - yes, someone who signs up should get their email credentials delivered to them. It's important however that you setup something like Postmark to ensure that they do indeed get this email delivered. WordPress it notoriously famous for not handling email deliverability very well. You want to rely on a third party service to do this. - Tony

Hi Philipp, this comment has actually thrown me off a bit as I do cover how to setup access and restriction rules. And, as you say, it’s a pretty lengthy video… There are timestamps in the description box outlining everything that is being covered in this video, from wireframing your site, to creating your membership product and connecting it to a payment processing system and a few more things. The only thing I did say in this video that I wouldn’t be doing is spend time doing any design work so that I could concentrate on the logistics behind building a membership site. Best, Tony

@@Thrivethemes I think it showed quite a lot and don't mind about the lack of design as it was the process I was after. However I do think I would like to see the effect of the different access permissions you set up. ie show us what happens when someone doesn't pay and the various conditional display options post payment. Unless I'm missing something I'm having to use different devices to test as when I'm logged in as admin I have access to everything!

@@patwilson5 Hey Patt - taking notes. Will do a more in-depth video on conditional display. I did record a video a while back where I show how to edit the different display views and connect them to your thrive apprentice product: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-js8qwx8dbe0.html Thanks for watching!

@@Thrivethemes I found this super helpful because I just wanted an overview of how to set the whole thing up, not an in depth tutorial for every part of it. I am happy to go into the tutorials section or Thrive University when I am actually doing the mechanics of a specific thing, rather than to have every single possible variation all in one video. So while I appreciate that everyone wants different things, I am super happy with the overview that this video gave me because I now feel like I know the shape of the overall engine rather than all the individual cogs and parts. Which is what I hoped for from the title. So thanks!