One of the many uses of WooCommerce is to create a membership site. Using a few extra plugins, you can create premium content that's only available to users who have purchased the correct products from your site. The nice thing about this setup is that, if you want your membership site to sell any products, it's really easy to add that functionality, whereas a typical membership plugin will only allow memberships.
You must have WooCommerce Subscriptions, Groups (free-of-charge on WordPress.org), and Groups for WooCommerce (premium, available at WooThemes.com) installed and activated on your site. You should also have a Simple subscription product already created.
We're going to use a free plugin called Groups, which allows us to group our users and restrict content to specific groups. After creating the groups and the content, we'll be connecting a product to a group with Groups for WooCommerce.
- In the WordPress admin, click on Groups.
- Go to Groups | Capabilities.
- Click on New Capability.
- Add a name for this capability. Something like
Read premium postsis a pretty good name.
- Click on the Add button.
- Click on New Group.
- Enter a Name for the group.
- Enter the name for your group such as
Premium Contentwill work well.
- Click on the Save button.
We've created a group and a capability. We need to tell Groups that this capability can be used to restrict access.
- Go to Groups | Options.
- Under Capabilities, add the new capability we have created.
At this point, we've created a group, created a capability, assigned that capability to a group, and told Groups the capability can be used to restrict content. Let's create a page that only that group can access:
- Go to Pages | Add New.
- Add a title and content as you would on any other WordPress page.
- In the sidebar, you should see an Access restrictions panel. Here, you can enter the capability you have created.
- Click on Publish.
Alright. At this point, we've successfully restricted the page to our premium group.
Now we need to connect a product to the group we have created.
- In the WordPress admin, click on Products and navigate to an existing subscription product in your store.
- Scroll down to the Product Data panel.
- Click on the Groups tab.
- In the Add to Groups field, enter the name of the group you created earlier.
- Click on Update to save the product.