The Membership Module

What is the Membership Module?

The Membership Module gives your website the ability to gather a list of visitors who are interested in your site or have a reason to be identified within your site.  Once you have a list of members you can perform special actions, apply restrictions and interact with your members in other ways.

How do people become Members of my website?

There are 2 ways people can become members of your site, depending how you have your website setup.

1. You can manually add members to the Member List within the Website Builder.
2. Visitors can use the registration form on your website, entering their details to become a member.

What can I do with Membership?

Membership can be used for many purposes, often depending on the other modules you have licensed in your Website Builder.

• By settings up policies you can allow/restrict access to information on you website, including website pages and file downloads.  You can also setup policies to switch templates, apply member discounts and other functions.
• Sending out special offers at set intervals to your members with Member Mailers.
• Collecting the details of people who place orders on your website, mainly for the E-Commerce Module.
• Having people sign up for your newsletter with the Newsletter Module.

As we develop more modules you will be able to do more with your members, including surveys, polls, subscriptions, forums and more!

 

How do I control how Members access my website.

The membership module features a Group / Policy / Role system to control access to your site.  Basically you put your members into groups, and assign policies to these groups.  These policies controls how the members in the group can access your site.

For more complicated websites you may also use Roles, which are purely groups of policies. In most cases you won't need these and they are only recommended for advanced users.

What happens to people who aren't Members of my website?

People who havn't chosen to register on your website will not be in your Member List.  However they are treated as 'Ungrouped' members, so you can still control how these visitors can access your site, by controlling what policies the special 'Ungrouped' group has.  This special group can not be renamed or deleted, but you can apply roles and policies to it.

How do I use this module to Email my members with special offers & information.

Currently the best way to do this is by using the Member Mailers section,  here you can setup an 'autoresponder' which will email a user a set time after they register.  For example you might want to send a special offer to anyone that registers, 1 hour after they activate their account.

We plan on expanding this functionality with more control over who the mailers are targetted at, more mailer types, and also an option to directly email all members in a selected group. 

For detailed information on each topic, please see the relevant help section..