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1. Adjust the Print Upgrade Settings 

Navigate to Memberpress -> Print Upgrade Settings

Default Area Code is used to help in situations where a customer tries to claim the upgrade but enters a phone number without an area code. It will automatically use the “Default Area Code” to try to verify the number.

Number of Header Lines determines how many lines to skip at the top of the file the customer imports. In most cases, the customer will just have one row at the top of the csv spreadsheet with the titles of the columns, so the number of header lines should be set to “1.”

API Key for Automatic User Creation is a feature that is not used.

Select Verification Type: There is a select box where you choose which verification method you are going to use. You can use just Phone Number, just Street Address, or both Email Address and Phone Number.

2. Create Your Spreadsheet (CSV):

The spreadsheet needs to be formatted with either 2 columns or 3 columns depending which verification method you chose.
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If using just Phone Number or Street Address, your spreadsheet should contain a column with the subscribers “ID Number” followed by a column with the subscribers Phone Number/Street Address.

If using the “E-mail Address, Phone Number” option, then your spreadsheet must have three columns: a column with the subscribers “ID Number”, followed by a column with the subscribers E-mail Address, followed by a column with the Subscribers Phone Number. It is okay if you do not have both e-mails and phone numbers entered for every subscriber — but every subscriber does have to have one of them.

The file must be saved as a .CSV file, named as today’s date, for example: 11242020.csv

3. Upload the Spreadsheet:

Import the spreadsheet from the Memberpress -> Import Print Users tab. Select the appropriately named .csv and click upload. Verify that the confirmation message you see indicates the proper amount of users were imported.

“Imported 1137 print subscribers “

This will also display a message indicating any users that had their access revoked upon import, due to no longer being included in the list of active print subscribers:

“Could not find identifier(7167900072 for 627. Please check print subscription record.
Removed online access for user id 627, subscriber number: 99999.”

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At this point, the latest print subscribers are uploaded to the site. Although we are not able to go in and visually see a list anywhere, think of it as they are in a queue waiting to be claimed when a customer submits their Print Upgrade request.

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4. Customer Claims Print Upgrade by selecting the Print Upgrade Membership option from the subscribe page or clicking the appropriate button to access the print upgrade request page.

They will be taken to a registration page where they enter their Name, Address, and Phone Number. If the customer is not logged in, and is therefor creating a new account, they will also be asked to enter an E-mail Address and Password. If the user already has an account, they should log in before claiming the Print Upgrade.

When the customer submits their request, the information they are entered is crosschecked with the .csv that was uploaded based on the selections you made earlier in Step 1. If you selected just Phone Number, then it will use the Phone Number field. If you selected just Street Address, it will attempt to verify using the Address field. And if you chose the E-mail Address, Phone Number option, it will scan the .csv for a match for either Phone Number of E-mail Address.

If there is a match, the customer is immediately granted the Print Upgrade Membership. The system automatically creates a Completed transaction for the user for the Print Upgrade Membership, and the expiration date will be “Lifetime” or “No Expiration.” This is because these memberships do not expire based on date — they expire based on whether or not they (still) exist on the latest .CSV that was uploaded. 

It is important to upload an updated .csv regularly so that customers whos offline print subscriptions have expired are no longer on the list, and therefor will have their Print Upgrade Membership revoked if one exists for them.

If the system fails to find a match for a user, then the customer will see an error message, and unfortunately, it will also create a Pending transaction in the system. You should not update these pending transaction to Complete — these are failed attempts to verify. If you do manually set them to complete, their access will be revoked the next time a .CSV is uploaded because the system will still not recognize the match.

When a customer gets an error message and asks for help, the only real possibilities are that the info they entered does not match the uploaded .CSV exactly, so it the onus is on your staff to make sure the information is accurate.

NOTES:

• When possible, we recommend NOT using Street Address for verification because the street address needs to match exactly. “Reed Street” is not the same as “Reed St” or “Reed St.” which will frustrate readers more than they already are. Also apartment numbers and such can be difficult.
• For any customer who gets an errror message saying their e-mail is already associated with an account: This simply means they already have an account on the website, and need to login to that account before claiming the print subscription. Reset their password, etc, if necessary until they are able to log in.

————————- UPDATED ABOVE 02/22/2020 ———————-

In order to allow your offline print subscribers to claim a free online subscription by verifying their print subscription, you must first ask us to set up a Print Upgrade Membership on your website.

Once this membership is setup, your staff will need to upload a list of current print subscribers each week.

1. Create a CSV file with the columns you’d like to use for your print subscriber upgrade.

There are three choices for customers to upgrade their accounts. You can verify their subscription by matching their Phone Number, their Street Address, or their Email and Phone Number.

The CSV file should have matching columns based on your choice above. The address/billing id is the unique number associated with their print subscription.

There are the CSV file formats:

Phone Number: “address/billing ID,phone”
Email + Phone Number: “address/billing ID,email, phone”
Street Address: “address/billing ID,street address”

Name the file today’s date in the “mmddyy” format. Example: 021420.csv

2. Once you have the file named properly, send it to ops@our-hometown.com so they can test the file and make sure the format is working correctly.

We’ll confirm that you have the format correct and upload your initial list. From then on, you can upload the list yourself.

3. Upload updated lists regularly

In order for new print subscribers to be added to the site you must regularly upload a log into the admin section of your site and click on “Memberpress -> Import Print Users.” This is because your offline print subscribers are not connected with website, and we do not have expiration dates for these subscribers (and even if we did have expiration dates, updating them as users renew offline would be painstaking).

Instead, you’ll upload a list of active print subscribers to the website as described above. There will be a “Print Upgrade” button on your website and subscribe page that an offline print subscriber can use to create an account and access online content. They’ll be asked to verify their account using whichever option you’ve selected above — address, phone number, or email and phone number. If the value they enter matches an entry on the list that was uploaded, that user will be granted a Print Upgrade Membership that has no expiration date.

Each time you upload a list of active print subscribers, the system cross checks that list with users who already have an active Print Upgrade Membership. If there is a user with an active membership who no longer appears on the new list you’ve uploaded, their membership will be expired and their access revoked. This is why it is important to upload a new list regularly: to ensure new offline subscribers can access content online, and to ensure offline subscribers cannot continue accessing online content after their print subscription has expired.

The post Print Subscriber Upgrade first appeared on Our-Hometown.

1. Creating the Free Membership

The first thing we need to do is create a simple, free membership with Lifetime access.

Enter the Membership Name, and then direct your attention to the Membership Terms box.

Make sure the Price is set to $0.00.

The Billing Type box will be grayed out, since there is price to bill.

The Access box should be set to Lifetime.

Add the Membership to a Group if necessary, or embed the membership form on a “Sign Up” or “Subscribe” page to allow visitors to access the subscription.

2. Turning on the Paywall

In order to protect articles from non-registered users, we have to turn on the “Paywall” — even though nobody is “paying” to access content in this scenario.

From the WordPress Dashboard, select Paywall Settings and choose “Protect All Articles.” Do not select any free categories unless specified by the customer.

As always, the paywall can take some time to apply to all articles. You may have to wait a few hours after turning the paywall “on” before you’re able to set up the Rules, which is the next step.

3. Creating the Rules for the Membership

We’ll need to create at least one Rule that tells the system to only allow visitors with an active membership to access articles.

From the WordPress Dashboard, locate Memberpress and select Rules from the sub-menu.

Click Add New to create a new rule.

Under Protected Content, select “Articles with Paywall” and type “Paywall” into the text box next to the drop down. Select the Paywall value when it appears.

Under Access Conditions, set the Type to “Membership” and then choose the membership you created earlier in Step 1.

Your Rule should look like this:

At this point, we now have a basic user registration system. Articles are all behind the paywall and the only ones who have access are those who have created a free account. Now, we have to turn on the Metered Paywall.

4. Enabling the Metered Paywall

Make sure the Metered Paywall Plugin is enabled.

Under Memberpress, choose the Metered Paywall tab.

Set the Number of Days to 30 (for a month) and the Number of Articles to the amount of articles you want non-registered users to be able to view.

Check the Display Remaining Views Popup option if you want to display a bar at the bottom of the page alerting the user to how many stories they have remaining before they must register for an account.

Your overlay should look something like this when finished:

The post Metered Paywall with Free Memberships first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Setting up Auto Renewals, also known as Automatically Recurring Memberships, in Memberpress is quite easy and can be achieved in just a few minutes. There are a few important rules you need to follow:

1. Never edit an existing “One-Time” membership to update it to an Auto Renewal membership, or vice versa. You will want to start fresh and create a brand new auto renewing membership to avoid conflicts with existing subscribers.
2. While you generally should not ever delete a user anyway, you definitely should never delete a user who is subscribed to an automatically renewing membership. This is not the correct way to cancel a subscription. In this scenario, the user would lose his account, but would still be an “active subscriber” and be charged each billing cycle.
3. You must be using one of our supported Payment Gateways and have all IPN, Webhook, or ARB settings configured properly: Stripe, Authorize.net, or PayPal

With that in mind, let’s get started creating our Automatically Recurring Membership.

1. From your WordPress Dashboard, find the tab titled Memberpress and choose the sub-menu item titled Memberships.
2. From this list of Memberships, click the “Add New” button.
3. Enter the Membership title. In this case, I’ll name it “Montly Auto-Renewing Membership”
4. Fill out the details in the Membership Terms box.
   1. Set the price that the customer should be charged each billing cycle.
   2. Set the Billing Type to Recurring.
   3. Set the Interval to your intended billing cycle. For this example, I’ve chosen the Monthly interval, but you can choose any of the following: Monthly, Yearly, Weekly, Every 3 Months, Every 6 Months, or create a Custom interval.

You’ll notice a couple of other options at the bottom of the Membership Terms box.

First, you’ll see a checkbox for a Trial Period. You can use this to give your members either a free or discounted trial period before their full-price membership begins. When you enable the Trial Period, you’re asked to enter a duration for the trial and the price of the trial. The customer will pay the trial free up front (if one is entered), but can cancel their membership prior to the end of the trial period if they decide they no longer want to subscribe. (Note: Trial must be entered according to days, but if the number entered is a multiple of 7 it will show up as weeks, multiples of 30 will show up as months and multiples of 365 will show up as years. If the number is greater than 14 and is not divisible by either 7, 30, or 365 there is a chance of having issues with your payment gateway processing the transaction correctly.)

In my example, I’ve set up the membership with a free 7-day trial period.

The second option is Limit Payment Cycles, which when checked allows you set a maximum amount of payment cycles for a customer. Once the max number of payment cycles has been reached by a customer, their access can be expired (or extended to a “Lifetime” membership). While this feature generally is not be used on our websites, it could be used in a scenario where you want to offer the auto-renewing membership for a short period. For example, you could set up a “6 Month Auto-Renewal Membership” that only auto-renews for 6 months, and then requires the user to re-subscribe.

Once you’ve configured your Membership Terms, you can finish filling out the rest of the details for this membership as you normally would, including the Registration, Permissions, Price Box and Advanced Tabs.

Publish the membership when you are ready.

The post MemberPress > Creating Auto Renewing Memberships first appeared on Our-Hometown.

OHT Staff:

• The plugin titled “OurHometown Gift Subscription” must be enabled.
• There is a .JSON GravityForm file that needs to be imported to create the form within GravityForms.
• GravityForms must be setup with a payment gateway, meaning Stripe or Authorize.net. (Paypal would not be supported).
• Under Memberpress Options, on the Account tab, make sure “Enable Coupon Field on membership registration forms” is checked.

This form should be placed on a new page for Gift Subscription orders.

Readers will fill out the order form with both their own contact information and the gift recipient’s contact information. They will be asked to select which membership they are purchasing as a gift — all memberships available in Memberpress will be listed.

Once the gift is paid for, the system will generate a one-time use coupon code specific to this order. The code can be printed immediately for hand-delivery by the person paying for the gift, or they can schedule it for e-mail delivery at a later date.

Once the recipient has the coupon code, they can go to the website and register for the membership that was gifted. They’ll be able to enter the discount code for a full discount, and their membership will be activated.

The post Gift Subscriptions first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Once enabled, you can access the plugin from the Dashboard under Memberpress -> Member Export

On this page, you select the memberships you’d like to export a list of users for. You can select multiple memberships by holding the CTRL key as you click items on the list.

There is a checkbox at the bottom labeled, “Export Expired Users.” If you check this box, then even members with inactive or expired accounts will be included on the list that is exported. If you leave it unchecked, only members with ACTIVE subscriptions will be included.

Click “Download CSV” to download the file.

The post Exporting Memberpress Subscribers first appeared on Our-Hometown.

ARTICLES:

Once the edition is published, go to Articles -> All Articles.

From the “Edition” drop down, select the date of the edition you are trying to make Free.

This will return all articles that belong to that edition.

It is best to adjust the “Screen Options” using the box in the top right corner of the page. Set the “Number of items per page” to a number higher than the total number of articles included in the edition. If you have 65 articles, set this option to 70 — so that all articles from the edition are displaying on the page at the same time.

This allows you to use the Bulk Edit feature to edit the entire edition worth of articles at once.

Use the “Select All” checkbox and then select “Edit” from the Bulk Actions menu and click “Apply.”

This will bring up an edit box at the top of the list of articles, allowing you to adjust some of the settings.

Under “Paywall”, being typing the word “Free” — the system should recognize this as an existing paywall option and you will be able to select it as it pops up on the screen.

Then click “Update.”

PDF Edition:

The PDF Edition is quicker to make this adjustment.

Click “PDFs” on the dashboard and find the PDF for the edition that you are trying to make public. (This same method is used for special sections that a customer might want to be free.)

Open the ‘Edit’ page for this PDF.

On the right side of the page under the Publish, Categories, and Tags options, you will see a box titled “Paywall” that asks: “Is this content protected?”

It will likely be set to “Use Category-Level Setting” by default, but you want to change it to “No” — meaning the content is not protected by the paywall and therefor is available for free to all readers.

The post Setting an Edition to Free Access first appeared on Our-Hometown.

To customize the fields per membership, go to the membership, click “Customize User Information FIelds” and then check the boxes for the fields you want active on that particular membership.

This must be done on each, individual membership.

Click update to save your changes.

The post Memberpress > Customizing user information fields first appeared on Our-Hometown.

To customize the usable payment method, if you have more than one, go to the membership, click “Customize payment method” and then check the box for the payment method you want available on that particular membership.

This must be done on each, individual membership.

Click update to save your changes.

The post Memberpress > Customizing Payment Options per Membership first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Under “Custom User Information Fields”, click the + button.

Fill in the name & type of field to user – select from text, email, URL, date, textarea, checkbox, drop-down, multiselect, radio buttons or checkboxes.

You can use these fields to offer free gift choices, agree to being added to a newsletter, or any other number of things.

One of the top things we use it for is adding “telephone” as a required field.

The post Memberpress > Adding Custom Fields for Accounts or Signup first appeared on Our-Hometown.

This will open up the “default unauthorized message” section for changes & auto-create the Thank You, Account, & Login pages.

Once you’ve done this, click “Default Unauthorized Message” on the “pages” tab, right above the “Update Options” button.

The default message says “You are unauthorized to view this page”. Obviously, you’ll want to update this to something more instructive and friendly.

You can type whatever you want here – add images, an ad, and whatever text you want.  We usually write something along the lines of “An active subscription is required to access this content. Please login in below or click here (add a link to your subscription page) to subscribe”.

This way people know to login or where to go to renew or purchase a new subscription.

On this page, it’s also a good idea to update the “Show an excerpt to unauthorized visitors”. Check the box, choose “custom” and decide on how may characters you want to use. This is important to make sure some content shows in the article widgets on the front page as well.

The post Memberpress > Updating the Paywall Message first appeared on Our-Hometown.