Basic Ideas
Unlike some membership systems, in Memberium users are primarily managed through Infusionsoft itself. This provides a consistent and clean way to manage your users that fully takes advantage of Infusionsoft’s marketing automation features. Access is determined by the tags that are applied to the user, allowing you to control the user experience with tools like Campaign Builder.
Take-Away Concepts Summary
- You do not need to create regular users in WordPress, you need only create them in Infusionsoft.
- Memberium has tools to create random passwords for you.
- You should use email address for username.
- You don’t need to delete cancelled users.
Usernames and Passwords
Memberium users actually consist of two user accounts that are combined together; the first is your Infusionsoft contact, and the second is your matching WordPress user.
Usernames
Some plugins let the user pick random usernames, and while Memberium can support this, we strongly recommend using the email address for the username. Using the email address for the username is:
- simpler,
- easier for the user to remember,
- provides for unique usernames,
- and you are guaranteed to already have it from when the user opts-in, or buys.
When you are creating welcome emails with the user’s username, be sure to merge in the correct field, and not use ~Contact.Username~, unless that is your username field. If you are using the email address, it would be ~Contact.Email~.
Passwords
Infusionsoft has a built-in password field, however we do not recommend you use it, unless you are migrating to Memberium from a platform like CustomerHub that already uses this field. The built-in password field is limited to 20 characters, and cannot support future planned features such strongly encrypted passwords.
Creating A User
When creating a user, you ONLY need to create the Infusionsoft contact. It’s actually better if you don’t create the WordPress user record. Memberium will do this automatically for you, and will make sure that everything is setup properly. Just create your user as an Infusionsoft Contact Record.
A contact needs to have the following elements present to be a Memberium user,
- First Name
- Email Address
- Password
- One or more Membership Tags
How to Create A Password
There are several ways to create a password for your newly created user.
- If you are creating the user by hand, you can simply enter the password into the password field of your choice.
- If you are converting over from WishList or another WordPress membership plugin, and don’t want to change the user’s password when you switch, you can do a bulk update of your Infusionsoft password field to “PASSWORD_PLACEHOLDER”, to allow Memberium to rely on the WordPress password to allow login.
- If the user is being created through a web form, you can let the user create their own password, by entering their password into the webform.
- If the user is being created through a legacy order form, you can add the password field as a custom field
- If the user is being created through a new order form, you can either automatically generate the password using Memberium, or you can hack in a password field. Hacking in a password field only works when using custom fields for a password.
If you use a custom field for your password, and want to use the password field in one of your forms, remember to use the proper code and do not use ~Contact.Password~.
Generating Random Passwords Automatically
Memberium provides a tool to generate random passwords for you, and load them into your contact record. You can run this tool by using an “HTTP POST” command through an Actionset or your Campaign. This tool will automatically generate the password and put it in the right place, but will not overwrite existing passwords by default, so it is safe to use.
To generate the password, you can get the Password generator HTTP post from Memberium > Settings > HTTP Posts/links tab. Copy the “Password generator example” from here and use it in your campaign. Click here to learn more about makepass.
Applying Membership Tags
Each membership level consists of 4 tags. The first tag is used to grant access to that membership level. The other three tags are used to block access to the membership level. They are:
- PAYF – Payment Failure
- SUSP – Suspend Account
- CANC – Cancel Account
The three cancellation tags are all named by adding their term onto the end of your membership level tag name. Memberium will create these tags for you automatically when you create your membership level in Memberium.
All three tags actually function identically; the different versions are provided to help make clear why the account’s access was blocked. The most common tag to use is the PAYF tag.
Updating Changes
Memberium will automatically update it’s copy of all the information about the user each time they login. You don’t need to do anything different or special to make that happen. If you need to immediately force a change to the user without waiting for the next login, you can do it with an update-contact HTTP POST. You can learn about updating contacts using HTTP POST here.
Terminating A User’s Access
Terminating a user’s access is simple, you can do one of several things.
- Apply Site Ban tag
- Apply SUSP, CANC or PAYF tag
- Remove their existing access tag
- Delete User from Infusionsoft
The most common scenario is to block access if the user’s recurring payment fails. To do this, you can use Infusionsoft’s Billing Triggers to add a PAYF tag if the payment fails, and remove the PAYF tag if the payment succeeds. This creates a system that requires little or no customer service intervention.
A Thought On Deleting Users
Note: Deleting the WordPress user is unnecessary, and may cause loss of data on your site, especially if you provide services such as forums. It’s best to simply deactivate the user. The cancelled user record takes up a very small amount of space and does not impact your site’s performance by a measurable amount.
