So to get there we’ll come here under ‘Setup’ and we will see a ‘Levels’ link here and this is what we’ll be automatically taken to. Now when you come here, if you already have some levels, of course you will see a list of those levels here and you can click into edit each one individually.

You also see over here we have edit membership level. You can duplicate a membership level, so if you have a membership level that you’re creating a bunch of membership levels, say for a modular course that is going to be very, very similar, have similar settings, you can duplicate, you can delete.

You can also change the level order here. So you can move these around to assign priority. The higher on the list the higher the priority is and that’s going to affect things like after, for example, an after-login page. Let’s say someone belongs to two membership levels and you have a different after-login page for each one, well how do we know which one we’re supposed to send them to because we can only send them to one? The level order will help determine that. So you can set priority here, so if someone belongs to you know Gold and the Trial, well Gold’s our priority, we want to make sure that if they belong to Gold they go to that and so forth.

So that’s kind of this page here, of course you’ll see the statuses here for active, cancelled, expired, needs approval, and email confirmation. How many in each of these statuses you have per level. So you get a snapshot of that.

All right, so now what we can do is we can go ahead and jump in here and create a new level. So we’ll just call this ‘New Level.’ You’ll need to give it a name before you can get started, so give it a name and hit ‘apply’ and now you’ll have all the settings available to you. So we’ll kind of go through these, talk about some of these in the wizard, but we’ll go into these in more detail here.

So expiration options. So this is, are you going to have an ongoing membership, is it going to be sort of a fixed term, is it going to end on a specific date? You have a number of options here. Most of the time, again, ongoing monthly membership, you’re just going to select ‘ongoing’ here.

We talked about this in the wizard video, but this is access too, so you may have membership levels like an admin level or a test level or maybe even a live level that is sort of your all-access pass that they get access to everything and you want to make sure that that always happens and you don’t forget and so forth. So you can turn this on to where this level gets access to absolutely everything. And now, when you go into editing a post, actually this level will be selected, you can’t deselect it in the post because you’ve set this here, so this kind of overrides everything and gives them access. This is probably a less common option, so most levels are probably not going to turn this on.

Next, we have the Remove From, so the idea here is when someone is added to a particular level, you can remove them from another level that they might belong to. This is particularly useful when you’re dealing with trials, so if you’re offering some sort of free or paid trial and then members can upgrade to sort of a full membership, oftentimes you want to remove them from that trial level now because they’re no longer a trial member, they’re now a full paying member. So you can use this Remove From to do this. So on your say, Gold level, your full level, you would say if someone joins this level, I want to remove them from the trial.

Add To is basically the opposite, so when someone joins this level we can add them to another level. One of the ways that I’ve used this is for bonuses. So what I’ll do is I’ll create, let’s say we have a set of bonuses that are going with a particular course or membership or whatever, instead of putting those bonuses in the membership levels themselves, I’ll create a, say I create a page for that bonus, I’ll create a membership level specifically for each bonus, and give that level access to the page where they can download the bonus that’s being offered or access it somehow. And then when someone joins, say, this New Level here, I will add them to all of those different bonus levels. And so what that allows me to do is say I have five different modular courses and I have the same bonuses for each course, well now I don’t have to constantly be adding and doing protection and access for all of those bonuses, I can just say ‘add to’ and I can add them when they join this course, they get added to those bonuses, or if they join this course they get added to those bonuses and it’s much easier for me to manage. So that’s what this add to is and it can be in handy in that regard.

Then this last thing we have down here is inherit parent level status. You’ll see in the tool tip here, if we do the ‘add to,’ this is tied to the add to, then the level selected in the add to section will inherit the status of the parent level. So what this means is if someone is cancelled from this level, new level, they’ll also be cancelled from the levels that they were added to if you turn this on. So it will inherit the status of this particular parent level. So that’s again tied to this add to. All right, so that’s the access tab.

Next, we can go into ‘registrations.’ So the first option here is to allow both, is our member registration options, you can see we can allow ‘both new and existing members,’ ‘new members only,’ or ‘existing members only.’ So the idea here is, let’s say I have, you know, a level a basic level, and people join the basic level and then I have an advanced level, they can move from the basic to the advanced, well when they move to the advanced, let’s say they have to be already a member of basic in order to move into the advanced. Well, what I can do is say this is for existing members only on the advanced level. So now when someone joins, is a part of basic and they go to join advanced when they go to the registration page, they’ll be presented with a login form instead of a registration page. And that makes them have to already have an account in WishList Member for them to be able to join this particular membership level. So that’s what this one does.

This one is sort of the opposite, it’s only new Members, right, so someone can’t instead of only going to the registration page being presented with the login form, they will only be presented with a registration form, there will be no login form. So this would be basically what you would do on the basic side. You would assume that’s only going to be new members so you can do ‘new members only.’ And then the last one is both, so if you select this, then there will actually be an option that will ask them are you a new member or are you an existing member and they can select and if they’re an existing member they get the login form, they can log in. If they’re a new member they can click it and they’ll get the registration form to register. So I would say most cases probably you’ll actually just leave it like this because you can get members from lots of different places and you don’t know exactly, if you have multiple membership levels, you’re not always 100% able to control how people register.

All right, so then we have this series of options here. So this is the enable registration form header/footer, so this is on the registration form, there’s the form and then there’s a header section above and a footer section below. You can enable those, and when you do, you’ll click ‘edit’ and now you can add in your HTML code above or your HTML code below. So that’s pretty straightforward, kind of self-explanatory.

Here’s enabling custom registration forms. So if you’ve created a custom registration form, you can then come in here and set that you want this level to use that registration form. You can also use the ‘+’ button here to create a new registration form. You will have to then go over and edit it and we’ll talk about where to do that and all that in a video specifically for custom registration forms. But this is where you set that you want this level to use that custom registration form.

Grant continued access, so this kind of does what the tool tip says, it allows a member to retain access to content they have been given access to after they cancel their membership. So, if they, you know, were a part of your membership they got access to a certain piece of content, then if you have this on when they cancel, they’ll retain access to that content whereas if this is turned off, they won’t be able to access any content because they’re not a member of the site. So you can decide what you want to do with this, but that gives you that option.

Prevent member from editing pre-filled Information. So when someone registers to your membership site and they do it through a payment provider and they get returned to the registration form in WishList Member to enter their registration details, we will try to prefill it with the information that we get from the payment provider. Okay, so PayPal or whatever, we’ll try to fill in the name and the email address and so forth. Now, what this will do, but we leave it editable so that the user can edit it if they need to and we generally recommend that that’s what you do. That’s why this is off by default, because, you know, the PayPal email address may not be the one that they actually check and use, they may want to use a different one and so forth. So, usually this is off, however, you can turn this on and what will happen is that pre-filled information that we grab from the payment provider will no longer be editable. So they won’t be able to edit it. So if that’s something you want to do, that’s the option.

Uncancel or re-registration, so what this means is if someone belongs to a level, they cancel and then they re-register for that level, this will uncancel them and give them access. Now, as the tool tip says here, this only affects a standard registration form. If you’re using an integration this will have no effect, the user will be uncancelled upon a successful payment. So if they register through a shopping cart, they will always be uncancelled on re-registration. And that sort of makes sense because they’ve just paid you money to re-register and so forth. What this is really more for is if you’re doing a trial level and someone, you know, joins a trial, they get cancelled from the trial and then they go back and they re-register for that trial again, can people essentially keep registering for that trial, do you want to allow that or not? You notice it’s off by default because most people probably don’t want to do that.

The last one here, then, is this enable simple registration URL and what this is is this is really meant as, we call it simple registration. It’s sort of a test registration URL. It’s really kind of meant for you as the admin for you to be able to look at your registration form and let’s say you add a header and a footer or you change one of these options up here and you want to actually see what the registration form looks like, this is the link that you need in order to do that. Then you click in there and you can press ‘Control’ or ‘Command C’ to copy it.

Generally, I would recommend that leave this on while you’re doing your testing and so forth, and then once you’re done just sort of turn it off because it is, it’s not like a big security issue or anything, but it is a little bit of a back door if someone were to somehow figure out this URL or accidentally send it to someone and then they shared it or whatever, that would give kind of a backdoor access to your site. So generally, leave this on during testing, but probably turn it off for production, unless you actually just want it’s a free registration level, then you can just send people to this link and it’ll take them to the registration form to allow them to register for free. So that’s what this is.

All right, next is the requirements tab. So again, we’ve sort of gone through this a little bit, but these are some of the different requirements you can have for your membership level. So you can require admin approval, this is for free registrations. You can do admin approval for shopping cart integrations, you can require members to confirm their email address, which we kind of talked about, terms and conditions, and you can require reCAPTCHA.

So if we just, let’s go ahead and click all of these on here, and you’ll notice that with each one of these there’s either a notification you can edit or a configuration you can do. So we can jump into ‘Edit Notifications’ for admin approval for free registrations. This is the email, the notification to admin, this is the user awaiting approval, so they’ll get an email that says hey, you’re in sort of, your account needs to be approved, you’re in that sort of pending status. And then once you approve them they’ll get this email. Okay, so these are the three different emails you can come in here and edit and so forth.

Same thing with require admin approval for shopping cart integrations, so you see the exact same three emails here that you can come in and edit.

Members confirm their email address, so this is again an email confirmation, they get an email they need to click the link in order to become an active member. And so you have a few different options here, so you can send the very first email that notifies them that they need to click a link. This is how many hours after they register, generally, you want to set this to zero so it’s sent right away. And then you can send a reminder, you know, every 24 hours, every 48 hours, every five hours, and then the total numbers of reminders you want to set. Now again, remember, with email confirmation, they will not be an active member, they will not be able to access content until they click the link in the email. Okay, so that is this email here.

Now one thing, this is going to be, as we go through everything here, kind of across the board when it comes to email, you know, you can enter the sender name, the sender email, the subject, you can write in your text here, you can see this is sort of a WYSIWYG editor that you can use here. We also have merge codes down here that you can insert for the first name of the member, their email address, username, you know, all of the different information about the user that you may want to put in here, you can use these merge codes. You’ll see this one’s already sort of put in here, so let’s say we wanted to add last name, we could come in here and pop in last name just like that. Okay, and that’s going to be across the board the different email options and notification settings that you can edit, you’ll see this very similar setup here. And of course, if you want you can always reset to the default, that will reset this to the default email address that we have in here right now.

All right, so we’ll go ahead and we’ll ‘save & close’ that, and now we’re down to required terms and conditions, so we can configure that. You’ve gone with the getting started wizard, just a simple box to put what your terms and conditions are. Then reCAPTCHA, this is configuring that, and this is a service provided by Google. You can come in right here to this link and click this link, it’ll take you to that service, allow you to create a key, it’ll give you the site key, the secret key and so forth, and you can drop those in here and use reCAPTCHA, and reCAPTCHA is the thing that asks are you human and it’ll show you a picture and all that. Usually you only want to do that for free registrations, so that is reCAPTCHA.

All right, next over here in additional settings, so the first one is this Registration Date Reset. We have it For expired level or for active level, so what this does is it resets the registration date when a member registers for an expired level. So again, this is, the way this works is, so for example, for an expired level, if someone joins a trial level, they get expired from it and then they come back and they re-register for it, what we’ll do is reset the registration date so that will actually reset that trial period. It’ll start, reset that clock for them expiring. So if you want to allow people to be able to re-register for a trial level, you would sort of turn this on. For active levels it does the same thing, the scenarios for that are maybe a little bit less clear, but you can do it for active levels too. So maybe it’s tied to sequential upgrade is probably the most common. What will happen is when they re-register to the level, that’ll reset the registration date which will kind of reset the sequential upgrade process.

All right, you can select the member role, so if you want them to be Author, Editor, most of the time you’re just going to want to be a Subscriber, but if you’re creating sort of an author site, you could set this to author here if you wanted.

Redirects, so after registration redirect if you want to custom after registration redirect you can turn this on. Come in here to ‘configure’ and you can do a message, you can select a Page or you can do a specific URL. So this is what they will see after they register, and if you want a custom one for this particular member or membership level then you can set that here. And again, a message, you can create a page or you can set a specific URL.

Very similar for after login and after logout redirect, so if we turn these both on, hit ‘Configure,’ again, we can create a page and send them to that after login. We can have a message that they’ll see and a WishList member will automatically create the page that that gets put into or we can specify a very specific URL. Ad after login, very same thing.

So what this allows you to do the main thing here is this is on a level-by-level basis, so it allows you to select these for this particular membership level. So in the advanced options, you can set these pages on a global level, but then if you come in here and set these custom ones that will override that sort of global default and make it specific to this membership level. So if you want to do that, this is where to do that.

All right, next is notifications. So we have the new member registration email that goes out, so when someone joins this particular membership level what email they are going to receive so we can come in here and edit the notification. You have the User Notification, so the one that will go to the user, and then this is the Admin Notification, the one that will go to the admin. You can enable or disable these, so you can turn this off, for example, if you want to. Turn it back on, and then you can come down here and again, this down here is going to be the same pretty much across the board for these notifications in terms of email. The name, the email, the subject, WYSIWYG editor, merge code, or setting to default, all of that. And then just always ‘Save & Close’ when you are done here.

Incomplete Registration. This one’s a little bit different in that this is if someone registers to your membership site and for some reason maybe they get redirected to the registration page and don’t fully understand and just click out of it and don’t complete their registration on your site or there’s something that happened in the communication between the payment provider and WishList Member and they don’t actually ever see that registration form, there’s some sort of error or something, that’s what Incomplete Registration is and what WishList Member does is it recognizes that and it will send them notifications to tell them hey, you need to complete your registration. So we can send the first one, you know, after an hour, or however long you send here. It could be minutes. And then we can send reminders every, oh five hours, 24 hours, and the total number we want sent here. So that’s what these options are. And like I said, the email itself, the settings here and how to use it are exactly the same and of course, always ‘Save & Close’ when you’re done.

All right, so you’ll notice that as you’re creating all of this everything is sort of auto-saving. You’ll see this little toaster message down here that tells you that something has been saved. So as you’re setting all these settings, it’s auto-saving them as you select them. Of course, the pop-ups are a little bit different, you have the save & close button, so you need to make sure to hit ‘save’ or ‘save & close,’ but once you do that, it sort of automatically updates in the background there. And so once you’re done creating, setting everything how you want it set, and everything’s auto-saved, you can hit ‘return to levels’ and your settings are saved. And so now you can come back to this list here, we could click back into our level and our settings are all saved how we wanted. So if I select ‘trial’ here, right you’ll see ‘saved,’ go to ‘return to levels,’ go back into ‘new level,’ and you’ll see that trial is saved there. So keep it a little bit easier so you don’t have to constantly be hitting ‘Save’ as you go through all of these different settings here. There’s a decent number of them here if you really want to go through them all. So makes it a little bit handier.

So that is creating, editing, working with membership levels inside WishList Member.