Well, I thought I had the theme hacks licked, but of course it was rehacked.  I’ve been trying to track that down before I go back and fix the theme (and really the whole blog) again.  To be honest, it’s rather depressing because it is a lot of work to keep this thing going.  Sometimes I feel like I’m just spinning plates - about the time I get the last plate spinning, I have to go back to respin the first ones because they’ve come to a stop.

On top of the hacks to my theme, there has been a ton of spam comments.  Unfortunately, when the theme got hacked it caused some problems with the WP-Members support forum so I’m getting support needs posted in comments because people are having problems with the forum.  Since I very much want to help people that need help with the plugin, I’ve been carefully going through the comment moderation process so I don’t accidentally delete a legitimate comment with the spam.  I want to come back and get those answered.

During this time, there have been some people that have used the PayPal donation for the plugin and of course, I give priority to their support needs.  So if you are still waiting on free support, please understand that I have to give priorty to those folks.  Of course, that was one of the purposes of the forum - to develop an area of common support issues so that people would be able to self-serve their needs, but with the hacks to the site, that hasn’t really worked out all that well.

So, to everyone, thanks for your patience! I do intend to work through these issues and get this blog back together.  I put too much work into my plugins to just let them die.  I just need some time to get this thing put back together.

This is the next step in the move toward the 2.1 release of WP-Members. The previous alpha release started the core of the admin functions. In addition, I am adding a few couple new features.

• The members page now includes a password reset option. The user is required to enter the correct username/email combination, then a new random password is set and emailed to the user.
• The ability to block pages has been added. As always, posts are blocked by default, and can be unblocked by setting a custom field of ‘unblock.’ Pages are set up exactly opposite - unblocked by default, but if you set a custom field of ‘block’ the page will require the user to be registered/logged in.

If you are currently using the plugin and have something for the “wish list,” be sure to stop by the forum and include it. By the way, if you are looking at using WP-Members and including a forum on your site, I will be testing the plugin with some of the WordPress forum plugin. The forum on this site is WP-Forum and is tied to WP-Members.

The final production version of 2.1 is probably a week or two away, but until then you can download the current production release here.

To assist in the support of the WP-Members plugin, I have added a support forum at http://butlerblog.com/wp-members/forums/.

This forum is linked up with the demo version of WP-Members that is running on this site.  That was one of the key reasons I did the major rebuild of the plugin to begin with - to tie in to other apps/plugins that utilize the users table in the WP database.  Since the demo version of the plugin and the forum are linked, I removed most of the default required fields in the registration.  You can register here and be able to use the forum (if you want to edit your info, or add additional information like AIM, you can do at the same link once you’ve logged in).

I’ve been working on WP-Members in a furious fashion this week/weekend. As I’ve already posted, I did release 2.0.1 that fixed the known bugs in the 2.0 release. Since then, I’ve been working on adding the needed user management in the admin area. This was present in 1.x versions, but since 2.0 changed to using native the WP user table, I needed to completely change the admin features in WP-Members.

This alpha release should be stable. It currently only adds two new functions into the script. These add the extra fields that are used in WP-Members to the WP Edit User page. Now you can view and edit the users that are registered as well as the extra field information.

As a new feature, if the user is logged in, they will be add information for the additional fields that WP has for the user (website, aim, yahoo im, jabber, bio). I’ve commented these in the code so they can be removed if you do not need them. (really, any fields that you do not need can be removed as well if you don’t mind working with php.)

This is not an official release version, so of course use it at your own risk, but I felt it was ready to be made available for public testing. (If you want the stable release, download it here.)

Download WP-Members 2.1.a

I am releasing a 2.0.1 version of the WP-Members plugin. This fixes the bugs that were in the previous 2.0 release. This version was tested on the new WordPress 2.1.3 and it works swimmingly!

I also created a “Quick Start Guide” to get new users up and running. This guide is available in PDF format and will walk a new user step-by-step through a basic setup of the plugin. It is geared to the complete novice and does not require any HTML or PHP knowledge whatsoever. It does assume that you are using a version of WP that had widgets enabled and that you are using a widget enabled theme. (I used WP 2.1.3 and the default Kubrick theme in the example.) My goal here is to make this easy for the complete novice but scalable for the more advanced user.

Although I don’t know when it will be completed, I am still working on a 2.1 release that includes the admin user management features that were in the 1.x version. Before that is complete, however, I am going to work on a series of videos to accompany the Quick Start Guide.

Go to the WP-Members page to download the 2.0.1 release of WP-Members and the Quick Start Guide.

(Also, there seemed to be some confusion on documentation between 1.x and 2.0 as I had it on the same page. I have permanently moved 1.x documentation to a new home.)