Your Members is a complex membership plugin. It is full of powerful and interesting features, such as embedding a membership site into Facebook, accepting Facebook Credits as payment, and more. It almost has all the features that one would want in a membership plugin, but it is not very easy to use and some features are not fully developed or sufficiently tested.
The documentation is helpful, but it’s hard to follow sometimes. Luckily, Your Members is backed by responsive and expert support, which could turn the plugin’s complexity into powerful flexibility!
Installation & Admin UI
Your Members is easy to install, just upload and activate. But before you can begin using the plugin, you’ll have to install your license by simply providing the email address that you used to purchase the plugin.
The admin UI is not a native WordPress UI. Some elements are discolored, misaligned, or otherwise have visual glitches. However, after you’ve gotten used to the admin UI of Your Members, you’ll find that it is practical. You can reach most screens with just one or two clicks.
Documentation & Support
Your Members documentation includes videos, complete tutorials, and even scripting and API documentation. Many pages of the documentation are a little out of date, but they’re still useful—however, there are still so many features and settings that aren’t covered in the documentation.
Unlike some other membership plugins, Your Members comes with life-time free support through the publicly open forums. In addition to this, Your Members offers 3 premium support options: Basic, Developer, and Platinum. Each one of those has its own perks and benefits, check them out.
Member Management
Your Members users management is excellent. First, it works with the built-in WordPress roles, which means it would work well with other plugins that also utilize WordPress roles and capabilities, such as the bbPress discussion forum. It enables you to show users their profiles outside the admin backend and easily embed custom registration forms on WordPress posts and pages. These features are available to most other membership plugins if you’re willing to install additional plugins, but Your Members has this built-in.
Your Members allows you to collect custom fields during user registration, and, of course, you can create unlimited membership tiers with the plugin.
Payment Processing Features
Your Members has a wide support for payment processors. It works with 2Checkout, Authorize.Net, Beanstream, CardFlex, ClickBank, Facebook Credits, MoneyBookers, PayPal (Standard only), WorldPay, and Zombaio.
Interestingly, Your Members is the only plugin that supports Facebook Credits as a payment method. But I would’ve liked to see support for PayPal Website Payments Pro as well.
There isn’t much documentation on configuring and setting up the various payment gateways that the plugin supports.
Coupon Codes
While it is possible to implement coupon codes with Your Members, the feature was only recently added and it has some problems.
Processing of Cancellations and Refunds
Your Members cannot automatically cancel a subscription with PayPal or other payment processors. That’s despite the fact that the plugin gives you a shortcode, [ym_user_unsubscribe], to be replaced with a link that would allow your users to cancel their subscription right from your membership website. What the shortcode does is cancel the subscription within Your Members, but the user will continue to be billed unless they also cancel with the payment processor, which kinda makes the whole thing useless…
Flow of Registration Steps
Because of lack of documentation, it is unclear what registration flows Your Members supports, and I don’t know how well Your Members integrates with PayPal Standard and Authorize.Net. But considering that it does integrate with these two payment processors, it is likely that it supports the following registration flows (each ‘→’ represents a redirect):
- Register → Login & access free content → Pay
- Register → Pay → Login
- Pay on PayPal first → Register → Login
- Pay and register account on one page on your site → Login
Content Protection Features
When it comes to basic content protection, Your Members can protect individual posts, pages, and categories. It cannot protect posts by their tag or URL.
With that said, Your Members can actually do much more than basic content protection.
Gradual Content Delivery
As you can see in the screenshot below, for every post or page in WordPress, you can set a number of days after which the content becomes available to the specific membership level. This is the only way to create a drip feeding effect in Your Members. It works well, but if your site relies heavily on sequentially delivered content, you may find the process tedious.
Protecting Files
Your Members can protect both normal digital files and streaming videos. For file protection, you just upload the file, using the Your Members Download Manager, and assign the file to a protected post. Whoever has access to the post can access the file—more information on that here.
The Pro version of Your Members includes the ‘Secure Stream Module’. This module protects video streams by making the video playable only from your own protected site.
Teaser Content and Scripting API
Protected content in Your Members must be wrapped in [private] shortcode. You may place your shortcodes so that some of the content is visible and some of it is protected.
[private] is not the only protection shortcode that Your Members offers. The plugin has many conditional tags that allow you to programmatically determine who can and cannot see certain content.
Members-Only Discussion Forum
Since Your Members works well with WordPress built-in roles, it should be possible to integrate with WordPress-based forums, such as bbPress, without problems. However, there is no explicit documentation on bbPress integration. The only available documentation on the subject is very much out of date.
Protecting RSS Feeds
Your Members generates a secure RSS token for every member, but there is no way to monitor requests to those special RSS feeds and restrict unauthorized access.
Protecting Entire Site
Your Members used to have the ability to lockdown the entire site, but I don’t see this option any where any more. And the documentation isn’t of much help.
Facebook Membership Site Protection
One very interesting feature that Your Members has is the ability to embed a protected WordPress membership site on Facebook—even accept Facebook Credits as payment for protected content.
Extensibility & API
In addition to conditional shortcodes, Your Members has some documentation on how a WordPress developer might create a plugin that integrates with Your Members.
Email Communication with Subscribers
Your Members has a built-in Mail Manager that allows you to send transactional emails using your own hosting server, or integrate with MailChimp to do all kinds of things: including the scheduling of emails, broadcasts, and synchronizing members with mailing lists.
Money Matters
Your Members comes in four different licenses, several support options, and a few add-ons.
The Starter license ($95) has none of the add-ons. The Basic license ($115) has the Facebook membership site, adaptive pricing, and password sharing protection modules. The Pro license ($150) has everything that the Your Members team developed plus premium support. Each one of those licenses permits installation on one site only. The Ultimate license ($300) is just like the Pro license but permits installation on as many sites as you own.
All licenses are backed by life-time support and 1 year updates. After this year, you can renew for a small fee, around $30.
Your Members is backed by a “14-day no-quibble money back guarantee”.
In Your Members, UK-based Coding Futures have created a piece of software that is as horrible as it is poorly tested.
This thing is so unstable and unpredictable that every time you change a setting, you are rolling the dice. Will your members disappear for no reason? Will you have to find a special patch to fix the damage done by an upgrade? I don’t know how its creators can both charge $99+ and view themselves in the mirror every morning. I’ve seen sturdier code design in books on programming your Atari 400.
Hi Ron,
I’m very worried to hear that you have been having issues with members disappearing I did quickly check our forums in case I had missed such a massive issue but couldn’t find a related post, still my email is tim@codingfutures.co.uk so please do email me and I will take a look at whats wrong.
I’m wondering if your issue was related to a problem with a PayPal bug in YM11.0.2/4 which has been corrected quickly in YM11.0.6. The bug caused users to expire and we did indeed release a special patch as soon as it was reported. YM11 was tested throughly, not only by our in house development team, but by members of the community for nearly two months and 4 beta versions. We work on a 4 month release cycle with 2.5 months being active development and 1.5 months testing and iterations.
If you have had a bad experience I can only apologise and if you haven’t already, I do suggest contacting us via the forums or me personally via mail. I couldn’t find your details on our Forum or in our CRM system so please forgive me for reaching out here.
Tim
Hi,
Recent versions of Your Members have addressed many of the issues mentioned here including considerably improving the UI to make it easier for people not wishing to use many of the advanced features.
Autoresponses are now dealt with through our dedicated YM MailManager (a replacement from the old “Your Responder”) which includes support for Aweber, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and the local server via WP-Mail. We also now have a built in affiliate system which can be accessed from inside the plugin.
….. and as Tim rightly says, we’re exceptionally proud that we provide free and open support to all our customers (we don’t hide behind a ticket system or members-only areas), it just requires a support contract to get telephone support or direct email contact with the dev team. Phone support is something we offer mainly for our high volume and high profile clients and not something the normal user would find value in .
All that said, it’s still great to see somebody trying to do genuine reviews of the major membership plugins (rather than just an attempt to earn some affiliate bucks, as so many other sites are), so if you’d like an up to date version of Your Members for review purposes, just drop me an email.
Thankyou for the write up if I can clarify a couple of points:
Your Members offers support for free to all customers not just Ultimate Suite Customers via the forums. Ultimate customers get in addition to the forums our “basic” premium support which is priority upgrades, private forum etc.
For more information – http://www.yourmembers.co.uk/premium/
“But if you’re on a tight budget, you won’t be able to take advantage of Your Members extensibility, which only a hired developer can utilize.”
Really wanted to emphasis that the basic version of Your Members has no strange restrictions in place, and we don’t encrypt the code in any version unlike many of our competitors.
Regarding 3rd Party mail gateways, we have slowly been withdrawing Your Responder and it’s being replaced by Your Members mail manager it does many of the functions Your Responder use to, but it also allows 3rd party services like Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor to be used.
Those were the big ones, there were a dozen or so smaller clarifications like which gateways we support etc but instead of waffling I will just thank you and encourage people to come check us out and not just for the price.