New membership website – UK based

  • Unknown's avatar
    mhjobes · Member ·

    Hi,

    I have been tasked to create a new website for our membership. We currently have a large site in Joomla but want to come over to wordpress with a hosted business account. My questions are as follows:

    Is there a function or plugin that will allow members to join – pay their fees and allow for auto renewals/setup direct debit ect?

    is there an easy to use photo system built in that can take a vast quantity of our archives of photos?

    Is there a comprehensive form system that we can customise our forms and take payments for our events. This would mean credit/debit cards and paypal etc?

    Is there a good document download system so we can send our 4 x annually magazine to our members of allow downloading of the magazine for members only?

    Is there a plugin that would allow us to show on a world map where our members are based?

    Finally the core itself – what security/backups and updates are included with the hosting package or do we have to manage that ourselves.

    I have a meeting with the committee on Monday 6th April 202 and would really like as much info as I can get prior to that meeting – much appreciated

    Mark J

  • staff-mckluskey · Staff ·

    Hi Mark,

    let me try to answer all your questions:

    Is there a function or plugin that will allow members to join – pay their fees and allow for auto renewals/setup direct debit ect?

    Yes, there are many plugins that will allow you that. I’ll suggest checking out WooCommerce and its extension WooCommerce Memberships:

    WooCommerce Memberships

    is there an easy to use photo system built in that can take a vast quantity of our archives of photos?

    With plan Business you have 200 GB storage for all your media files. Uploading an image to your site is easy and there are a couple of way to do it:

    https://wordpress.com/support/images/

    Is there a comprehensive form system that we can customise our forms and take payments for our events. This would mean credit/debit cards and paypal etc?

    You’ll probably want to use a plugin for that, depending on your exact needs. As for payments, WooCommerce offers a number of different payment gateways:

    https://woocommerce.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensions/payment-gateways/

    Is there a good document download system so we can send our 4 x annually magazine to our members of allow downloading of the magazine for members only?

    You can send out the magazine via email with MailChimp or allow the users to access it directly from their account on your site while using the WooCommerce Memberships extension mentioned before.

    Is there a plugin that would allow us to show on a world map where our members are based?

    I’m not aware of a plugin that would allow you that (we do not develop plugins), but you can search for one in the plugin library here: https://wordpress.org/plugins

    Finally the core itself – what security/backups and updates are included with the hosting package or do we have to manage that ourselves.

    These are managed for you automatically with Jetpack on plan Business. Here you can find more information about that:

    https://wordpress.com/support/business-plan/

    Let me know if you have any more questions regarding that.

  • Unknown's avatar
    mhjobes · Member ·

    Hi – Thanks for the response and I will look at all the solutions. I did forget to ask one question and that is – Can I build the site first and view using a wordpress generated URL and when I am happy then assign our domain name to the new site so we dont have downtime – if this is possible what is the process for doing that?

  • staff-mckluskey · Staff ·

    Sure thing, when creating a site, you will see that you will be asked to choose a domain, type in the free subdomain with .wordpress.com at the end. You will see some suggestions below, make sure to choose the free option.
    Whenever you’re ready to go live, you can then map or transfer your custom domain:

    https://en.support.wordpress.com/domains/map-existing-domain/
    https://wordpress.com/support/move-domain/incoming-domain-transfer/

    You can purchase any plan you’d like to try and, if you’re not happy, you can cancel and obtain a refund within the first 30 days. Bear in mind that if you register a custom domain, you could only opt for a full refund during the first 96 hours. After that time, we would only be able to refund the cost of the plan minus the cost of the domain.

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