1. Now setting a var “code_level” in javascript in applydiscountcode.php so it can be used to manipulate prices, etc after applying a discount code.
2. Added the pmpro_cancel_previous_subscriptions filter, which is set to false will skip cancelling the old membership level/subscription at checkout. This is dangerous, but is used by the pmpro-addon-packages plugin to have an addon charge without affecting the old subscription. This works because the user is checking out for the same membership level. (So they don’t really have > 1 membership level.)
3. Trimming strings sent to the Authorize.net API in the subscribe and update calls.

#3 there may have been throwing errors on your site if you had very long membership level names or levels with special characters in them.

#2 refers to some hooks that are used by the new pmpro-addon-packages plugin which was released in beta yesterday. The plugin allows you to set a one-time access price for a specific page. Users will still need a membership level (you can create a free one if you don’t need them otherwise).

The PMPro Addon Packages plugin is meant as a temporary solution for people who want to offer multiple simultaneous membership levels for their users. This functionality will be rolled into PMPro in a different form eventually.

You can get the PMPro Addon Packages plugin at GitHub right now:

https://github.com/strangerstudios/pmpro-addon-packages

So… if you don’t need that field to be visible, e.g. if you only ever give out discount codes to specific people that you can share the full link with, then you can use this code to hide the discount code field from your checkout form.

/*
	Only show the discount code fields if a code is passed in via URL paramter
*/
function my_pmpro_show_discount_code($show)
{
	if(empty($_REQUEST['discount_code']))
		$show = false;
 
	return $show;
}
add_filter("pmpro_show_discount_code", "my_pmpro_show_discount_code");

We also added some new hooks and filters to support plugins and custom development. More info on those plugins coming soon hopefully.

Thanks!

= 1.4.4 =
* Using get_admin_url instead of home_url in various places so the links will work on sites installed in a subdirectory. (Notifications, admin bar, pagination in admin screens, etc.)
* Wrapping some XML fields in Authorize.net API calls in <![CDATA[ ]]> to avoid issues when non-text characters (e.g. &) are included in the level name, etc.

= 1.4.3 =
* Fixed a bunch of notices and warnings on discount codes page in admin.
* Added hooks for changing the discount code page: pmpro_save_discount_code_level, pmpro_save_discount_code, pmpro_discount_code_after_settings, pmpro_discount_code_after_level_settings. Look them up in discountcodes.php to see how they work.
* Updated pmpro_send_html(), which filters emails, to use wpautop instead of nl2br. This will fix any extra double spacing you may have noticed in your emails.
* Added a stripslashes around the membership level confirmation text on the confirmation page. Extra slashes were breaking links, etc.
* Added membership level to subject of checkout confirmation email sent to admins.

= 1.4.2 =
* Fixed bug that was added slashes into a level’s description and confirmation when saving.
* Removed wp_editor use is the blog is running a version of WordPress < 3.3. (Note: We will only officially support the latest version of WordPress with each release.)
* Added the pmpro_pages_shortcode_{membership page} filter. This can be used to filter the content output by the pmpro_checkout and other page shortcodes. e.g. use pmpro_pages_shortcode_checkout to tweak the HTML output of the pmpro_checkout shortcode. The pages are “account”, “billing”, “cancel”, “checkout”, “confirmation”, and “levels”.
* Added a “use_ssl” option. For the PayPal Website Payments Pro and Authorize.net gateways, this must be on. For Stripe, this will default to on, but can be switched off. For PayPal Express and the test gateway, it will default to off but can be switched on. When on, the checkout and update billing pages will be forced to be served over SSL. If off, those pages will redirect to non-ssl versions. The previous hooks/filters for overriding this will still work.
* Added pmpro_save_membership_level and pmpro_membership_level_after_other_settings hooks to be able to add fields to the new/edit membership level page.
* Fixed some more warnings and notices.
* Updated checkout page to use pmpro_isLevelFree() in logic to display recaptcha or not.

= 1.4.1 =
* Fixed critical bugs with PayPal Express.
* When a PayPal cancellation returns error “11556″ (The subscription must have status “active” or “suspended”.) I am cancelling the membership without an error. Most likely the PayPal subscription was already cancelled on the PayPal side.
* No longer trying to cancel a subscription with the gateway if a membership/order doesn’t have a subscription_transaction_id. (It was a initial payment only membership probably.)

(If you haven’t upgraded, get the latest version now.)

Stripe is an interesting payment option as it allows you to accept credit cards on your site, but gets around the PCI Compliance issues by using javascript to tokenize the credit card information before passing it through your servers. What this basically means is that your checkout functions the same way as an Authorize.net or PayPal onsite checkout, but is much more secure.

Stripe’s fees are comparable to the other big gateways, though their structure is much more simple. It’s just just 2.9% + $0.30. That’s it. No monthly fees. No extra fees for gift cards or American Express. There chargeback fee is $15, which is less than I pay with Authorize.net now.

Stripe is a new company, and maybe hasn’t had enough time to rack up the complaints, but they seem to be doing everything right. Their signup is very fast. You can accept payments immediately. What we love most of all is how clear their API and API documentation is. You can tell that the system is built by modern day developers who understand how it is going to be used.

With regards to Paid Memberships Pro integration, some of the pricing options are unavailable out of the box if you are using Stripe. But you can do one-time checkouts, monthly or annual recurring payments, or a combination of those two. Free trials are possible, but billing cycle limits are not supported at this time.

Strip also has some features that we don’t take advantage of out of the box, like prorated upgrades/downgrades and the ability to update a user’s subscription without re-authorizing (e.g. for metered billing).

Nearly anything is possible with a little bit of work though. So get in touch if you have needs that are not supported out of the box.

I’m excited to be able to share with you an incredible WordPress project we’ve been working on for over a year. The site is the Value Prop Accelerator, a “marketing planning platform that shows you how to design, document and execute a winning marketing strategy”.

If you are in a business where you are responsible for any kind of marketing or product development at all, you should sign up for the free trial now and take a look around. Using the Accelerator is like having a marketing consultant in a box. The site is the brain child of Jose Palomino and combines pages and pages of insightful marketing knowledge with tools custom-built to help you develop a marketing plan.

I’ve been using the Accelerator to develop a marketing plan for Paid Memberships Pro, and the process has been invaluable. Using the Accelerator helped me make the decision to release PMPro as 100% GPL, has informed what order I build out features, and has helped me analyze my customers and competition to market our products more effectively. I’m not a millionaire yet, but I’m much more confident in what we’re doing with Paid Memberships Pro. I’d love to have readers here try it out and let me know what you think. I know Jose would appreciate it.

The Value Prop Accelerator is built entirely on WordPress, using Paid Memberships Pro for membership handling, and tons of custom code to enable the project tools. The remainder of this post will go into a little bit of detail for some of the cooler features and how we bent WordPress to our will to create what I think is one of the most complicated WordPress applications around.

Free Trial without Requiring a Credit Card

Paid Memberships Pro allows you to set a trial period and price for your membership. However, if the membership isn’t completely free, users have to enter their credit card at checkout. With Accelerator, we have a Trial membership level that is completely free and expires after 30 days. We’ve added code to tweak the account pages and notification emails to route users to sign up for a second “Monthly” membership which is paid. The Trial membership level can only be signed up for once for each user.

Sponsored Team Members

When you sign up for Accelerator, you get 2 “seats”. One for you, and one to invite a team member to your project. The invited user has limited permissions and can only interact with your projects unless they upgrade their own account. Users can upgrade their membership to purchase more seats for a larger team.

Worksheets

While reading through the Accelerator material, you will see various “worksheet builder” sections asking for input on the current topic. For example, one of the early ones asks you to write out a “mission statement”. At the end of a “module” (kind of like a chapter), you can view an editable worksheet with all of your compiled answers. This means you’re not just reading the material, but actively working on your plan as your go through.

On the admin side, the worksheet fields are controlled by some clever shortcodes that allow Jose and his team to place these fields anywhere they want. All of the responses are stored in project meta (more below) and can be output in various ways.

We’re working on an export to Word Doc plugin that we’ll be able to release as some open source code.

Discussions

The “discussions” in Accelerator resemble a typical web “forum”. These are really highly designed comments on each WP page in the system. The comments are tied to the project system (more below) so that you only see discussions for your current project and can’t see discussions from any one else project. (FWIW, the new bbPress plugin wasn’t ready when we started working on this or we might have built out the discussions using bbPress forums.)

Action Items

The Accelerator comes with a fully functional todo list with assignments and due dates.

Check Lists

Separate from the action items are a checklist for each module that helps you keep track of where you are in the content. The checklists are built on the fly by Jose and his team using shortcodes we developed. When the module page with the checklist table on it is updated by an admin, a custom table is updated to keep track of each projects status for each item. An intelligent sidebar widget determines if the current page you are on is on a checklist and builds a smaller checklist on the fly for you. As items are checked of the checklists a status indicator is updated using cool red-to-green dots showing progress overall and on a per module basis.

Shared Files

Team members can upload files or links through the front end, which are combined into a shared file repository for each project.

Projects

We added a whole project layer on top of WordPress. Users can create multiple projects and invite team members to their projects. All discussions, action items, check lists, worksheets, and shared files are tagged to a certain project so all interactions you do within the site are within the scope of your current project.

The coding for all of this was pretty complicated. One little hack that helped is that we simply added a table called “projectmeta” with the same structure as the “usermeta” and “postmeta” tables. Then all we had to do was copy a few of the postmeta functions and replace “post” with “project” and bam! We can piggy back off of all of the great WP code for usermeta to manage our projectmeta. (I should write up a separate how to for this.)

Smart Help

As you explore the site for the first time, various help boxes will popup explaining things. The content of these help boxes is controlled via WordPress pages. The content team just builds out the help pages as they normally would and we tag certain tools and pages with the help page IDs to tell the system which help blurb to show. We use user meta to keep track of which blurbs have been shown already so we don’t pop them up again in the future.

Ask an MVP

This is a cool feature of the site that we’ve considered launching as a stand alone product. Basically if you need help on a certain question in your marketing plan, you can send out an email invite to ask your colleagues (your MVPs) a question. The invitees are directed to a page where they can respond to your question. All of the responses are aggregated as comments on a post of type “askmvp” using custom post types. Invitees can then sign up for a special membership level that will let them view all of the other responses and participate further in the discussion. For users, it’s a great way to get feedback from people outside of their project. For Value Prop, it’s a great viral component that will hopefully expose the product to new people.

Tons of Other Plugins

We built plugins to allow for an easy to mange sidebar, to power the assessments, a “suggest a resource” form to place on various pages, to pull content from Google News, and tons of other little bits of functionality throughout the site.

Tons of Other Shortcodes

We added shortcodes to aid with embedding videos with custom pre and post roll. Shortcodes for adding links to generate new discussion items or action items when clicked. Tons of shortcodes to make managing the site content easier.

In Summary

There is so much WordPress goodness bundled up in this site. We’ve been working on it for almost two years, and I’m so stoked to be able to share what we did with the WordPress community. A lot of people don’t believe applications like this are feasible in WordPress. They definitely are. Of course it took hundreds of hours of programming, but we are able to build on top of the WordPress platform which gives us access to quality content and user management, great security, and everything we love about WordPress. We never once “hacked the core”, and have programmed things in a way that we’ve been able to upgrade WordPress and most of the plugins we use seamlessly without causing issue. (We still backup and test things for sure.)

There is enough material in this one site to power dozens of WordCamp presentations and how to blogs. If you are interested in learning more, let me know in the comments. And be sure to sign up for the free trial and spread the word about this incredibly useful new site for small businesses and everyone that could be doing a better job at marketing with their company.

Because time is money, we’re really just talking about saving them money. The value of your membership product will be equal to the amount of money it helps your customers save or earn.

If you can convince your customers that purchasing your membership product will save them more money than it costs, getting them to checkout is just a formality.

What’s the Value of a Paid Memberships Pro Membership?

Here at Paid Memberships Pro, we don’t stress the time and cost savings of our products enough in our marketing. I’ll go through some thinking right now around how much a PMPro membership is worth to our customers.

Consider the aspects of a PMPro membership that have quantifiable time or cost savings:

1. The PMPro Plugin (Free*)
2. Member Lite Theme ($50)
3. PMPro Documentation (Timer Saver)
4. PMPro Support (Time Saver)
5. Software Bundle (Time Saver)
6. Business Advice on the Blog (?)

* Other membership plugins of the caliber of PMPro fetch $100-$300 just for the code itself. But the PMPro plugin is available for free through the WordPress repository, so we won’t include that fee when calculating the value of a PMPro membership.

The Member Lite theme then is the only piece with an immediately apparent value ($50 based on the cost of similar themes). The key to determining the value of a PMPro membership will be in figuring out the value of the time saved in #3-5 above, and the figuring out what that time costs our target customers. Before we do that, we need to know more about who our target customer really is.

Who is Our Target Customer?

Understanding your target customer will make it easier to answer questions about what they value in general and how much they will value your product.

Our current PMPro members come in different sizes and flavors. Some are looking to do something very specific with PMPro and just need access to the one piece of documentation they found that has steps to do exactly what they need to do. Some of our customers are developers themselves who are involved with several sites, all with different requirements, trying to push the plugin to do new things. Some of our customers fall somewhere in between, with one or two support requests helping them to setup their membership site how they want.

To complete our pricing analysis (and honestly to market our product better) we need to get more specific about which customers we’re going to target. There should be one prototypical cusotmer that we develop for and market to. If we have different kinds of customers, we need to pick the one we can serve best, or the one that will make us the most money.

When you try to appeal to different types of customers, you end up aiming somewhere in the middle and miss them all. If you feel you must address to types of customers, build different products for each and tackle them one at a time.

So which type of customer described above is the best opportunity for Paid Memberships Pro? We should survey our existing users to help figure that out. (Perhaps the subject of another blog post.) In the meantime, we can make guess for the purposes of coming up with a value for our membership product.

Let’s come up with a profile for a customer buying our base membership, what we’re calling lately the “do it yourself” package.

A typical DIY customer is a man working as a WordPress developer or Internet Marketer. He sets up several WordPress sites every year. He has some programming experience and is capable of copying, tweaking, and pasting code to customize how WordPress and its plugins work.

He charges $40/hour or $1500 per website. He’d rather get help to do things himself vs. hire someone to do it. He is frugal with his money (part of why he does things himself), but also values his time and is willing to spend money on things that will let him do his job faster.

Our DIY customer is married with two kids and a dog. He does this WordPress work from home. He worries about providing for his family. He enjoys learning. He feels good when he is able to launch a site that pleases his clients.

Back to Pricing

How does this DIY customer profiled above value the different parts of our PMPro membership? The key assumption we made was that this person charges $40/hour for his time.

If he’s charging a client for his time, maybe it’s okay if configuring the membership section of his website takes an extra 5 hours. That’s more billable hours! Sometimes though, it’s not easy to tell a client that you spent $200 of their money figuring out how to do something. Also, developers will often sell a site at a fixed price. So the faster they get the site finished, the higher margin they will make. In reality, our DIY developer might not be able to deliver the membership functionality at all without our documentation and support. A PMPro membership gives him the ability to deliver on larger projects and bill more time.

In general, we’re targeting the types of developers who need help and are willing to get it. So if we can save our customer 3 hours through our documentation and support. That’s worth $120 to him. If he uses our bundle zip and saves 1 hour per project during setup. That’s worth $40 with every site he sets up.

The idea again is not to come out with an exact value for our membership, but a better idea of how our  target customer will value his membership. This can tell us if our gut numbers are too high or too low.

What Did We Learn?

Are we going to save our DIY customer 1 hour or 10? In either case, the value of our membership is more than enough to justify the $19 we charge. But we know that if we charge $99/month, we make the decision to checkout a lot harder for a large portion of our customers.

Thinking about the value of our membership has also given us some insight into to model our pricing as well. For example, is our DIY customer above getting the same value out of his membership in month 2 as he will when he first signs up? Perhaps not. We should consider a higher one-time fee, or make sure that our blog posts and other periodic offerings add up to at least $19 in savings to make it worth keeping a membership active after you’ve gotten your questions answered and your site launched.

I don’t have all of the answers here. I haven’t even figured this stuff out for my own membership site. However, I hope this post has shown how one can go about thinking about your customers and how they will value your membership products. Knowing how your membership will be valued will tell you if you are charging too much or too little and will also provide bullet points to help your marketing.

More on Pricing

Read the entire series on pricing.

1. How much do you want to make?
2. Time and materials x margin.
3. What’s the value of a membership to your customers? (This post.)

The list of PayPal error codes doesn’t say much on how to fix this.

What you need to do is:

1. Make sure you’ve selected the correct Gateway Environment (Sandbox/Testing or Live).
2. Make sure you are using the correct Account Email, API Username, API Password, and API signature for the environment you selected. (Your live and test API information will be different.)
3. If in the test environment, make sure that you are logged into developer.paypal.com.

That should do it!

* Rewrote the pmpro_login_redirect function. It’s cleaner now. Important: there was a pmpro_login_redirect hook in there that was fairly redundant with the core login_redirect hook. I’ve renamed the pmpro hook to pmpro_login_redirect_to because I had a hook with the same name (pmpro_login_redirect) used in a different place to control whether or not PMPro redirects the register page to the levels page. Having one hook for two things is a bad idea. It seems like more people were using the hook for controlling the registration redirect, so I left that one alone and renamed these.
* Changed PMPro page creation to set all membership pages as subpages of the membership account page. This results in nicer menus for themes that add all top level pages to the menu.
* Updated the checkout page to submit to “” (itself) instead of echoing the checkout page URL here. (Since we can have multiple checkout pages.) This also fixes from SSL conflicts that may crop up on the checkout page.
* Updated the priority of a few actions/hooks so the “besecure” https stuff gets run as soon as possible. Before it was possible that some URLs could be written out with http: on an HTTPS page before PMPro had a chance to fix things. You should have fewer SSL errors on the checkout page to deal with now.
* Added an option on the payment settings page to “nuke” http: links on all secure pages. This option can add time to your page loads, but will ensure that all http: links for your domain are replaced with https: links.
* Allowing multiple pages to use the [pmpro_checkout] shortcode so you can create multiple checkout pages. This is good if you want a separate templated checkout page for each membership level or product you have.
* You can now add a pmpro_default_level custom field, set to the id # of the level you want, that will be used if you navigate directly to a checkout page without setting a level.
* Added some stuff to support adding shipping fields via hooks. Add this plugin to your site, edit, and activate to add shipping to your checkout: https://gist.github.com/1894897
* Removed the price from the description sent to PayPal. The DESC field is limited to 127 characters and must match up across API calls. So there is a good chance the price would get truncated which could be confusing. This was a kind of hack anyway. PayPal should show the price data it has. Not sure why it won’t. The price is still reviewed on the review page of your site though.
* The recaptcha code now checks for a previous error before changing pmpro_msg to “All Good”.
* Fixed warning in pmpro_has_membership_access(). Fixed a bunch of other warnings here and there.
* Rewrote pmpro_updateMembershipCategories() just to be cleaner
* Added pmpro_state_dropdowns filter. If you return true, the state field will become a dropdown with US states. Use the pmpro_states and pmpro_states_abbreviations filters to change the array of states used.

We plan to add additional quality open source themes and plugins to the bundle overtime. Feel free to recommend something in the comments. Only themes and plugins that we’ve personally used and recommend will make it into the bundle.

Grab the Bundle From the Download Page

Full list of plugins included at the time of posting:

• Akismet
• bbPress
• BuddyPress
• Google Analyticator
• Paid Memberships Pro
• SS Downloads
• SS Old URLs
• Theme My Login
• WordPress SEO
• WP DB Backup
• WP Hide Dashboard
• WP Super Cache