With the release of 2.2 this week, WP-Members achieved a couple of milestones.  First, we had our biggest (and also third biggest) number of daily downloads this week. 246 downloads in a single day is the biggest we’ve had since we released version 2.1.1 on WordPress.org.  Unfortunately, I didn’t track  downloads prior to moving the plugin to WordPress.

Our other milestone is that WP-Members has now had over 12,000 downloads since moving to WordPress.org.  That certainly doesn’t make it the world’s most popular plugin, but I think it’s cool.  We are on track to see it cross the 13,000 mark before we reach the 1 year anniversary of moving to WordPress.org.

Thanks to the users of the plugin for making this happen!

Shameless plug: This plugin has been an ongoing project of mine since 2006 when there were no other membership plugins.  I haven’t kept track of the time, but well over 1000 hours have gone into its development.  Supporting my site’s sponsors or making a donation help defray the costs of hosting this site and ongoing plugin development (go here and hit the donate button).  Also, services are available for customization (and references are available on customization projects I have done). Feel free to contact me for customization requests or other freelance work.

8/10/2010 Update: We’ve passed the 13,000 mark already with about 6 weeks to go until the anniversary of moving this plugin over to wordpress.org. I think that we will likely pass the 15,000 mark by then. Also, thanks for helping make this plugin more popular! WP-Members has been moving up the charts of the most popular plugins on wordpress.org and we are now on page 17 if you look under popular plugins in wordpress.org and on page 11 if you are looking at popular plugins through your admin panel. This puts us around #247. That is out of a current 10,666 plugins available through WP. #247 out of 10,666? I can live with that 😉

This is an important fix for users that upgraded to WP-Members 2.2.0.  If you recently upgraded WP-Members to 2.2.0, make sure you do this additional upgrade.  This upgrade can be done directly from the WP admin panel.

This fix includes two important updates:

• This use of nonces for the admin panel
• A bug in the password update function

I have completed the WP-Members 2.2 upgrade and released it via WordPress SVN. You can download a copy of it from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-members/.

Alternatively, you can get it directly from the WP admin panel by selecting “Add New” from the plugin menu and entering the search term WP-Members.

If you are an existing user of the plugin, you can upgrade via the admin panel as well.  However, if you have done any customization to the code of the plugin, you should probably test the upgrade in a testing environment (actually, this is a good habit to be in for any plugin).  If your customizations revolve around changing which registration fields are required or whether posts are blocked/unblocked by default, you should have no problem with the upgrade – you’ll just need to make sure that you have updated your settings appropriately.

As discussed here, this version better enables users to customize their installation and use of the WP-Members plugin.