There are a number of well established commercial WordPress plugins that provide an almost perfect solution out of the box for our customers. These plugins are big part of what makes WordPress a great and affordable solution for so many websites. Often however, a business needs something “just a little custom”. Where a full custom solution might be tens of thousands of dollars in development, a $100 plugin and a few hours of custom development can deliver a similar highly tailored solution. This recently completed project extending MemberPress is a great example.
Unique Client Needs
A client using MemberPress came to us wanting to offer their members the ability to purchase a gift membership for someone else as well as a way to set up and manage a very customized 40 day email drip program.
Taking Something Good And Making It Better
We love working with the MemberPress plugin. It’s robust and can meet the needs of many membership sites. However, each business is unique in the services it delivers to it’s customers and sometimes delivering those services requires extending the functionality provided by a plugin.
Implementing the gift memberships was more challenging than it sounds. The existing coupon functionality in MemberPress assumes that a site administrator would simply create a coupon code for use by many users. We started with this and extended it such that users could purchase a 100% coupon and that coupon could be sent to someone as a gift. The final tweak was to make it so these coupon codes were one-time use only.
The 40 day drip program took people through a series of daily questions about each day’s lesson. MemberPress tracks progress through the drip program but doesn’t allow users to go back and repeat the program. We created a plugin that allowed users to reset the program to day 1 and wiped out all of their previous answers so they could start the process anew.
Both add-ons work independently of one another giving the site owner flexibility in which add-on functionality is active at any given time.
Customized Solutions
There are countless amazing plugins out there that do a massive range of things for a specific need. When you need something a little different the most affordable solution may be to extend one of those existing plugins to fit your particular need. Contact us. We’ll create the perfect plugin add-on for you!
