Paid membership functionality lets you earn revenue from your website by offering various membership plans. These could either be on a subscription basis or single purchase options. Depending on the membership plan selected, users can gain access to different parts or features of your site. This could include content access or the ability to submit posts.

Membership plans can be managed in In WP admin ➝ Membership ➝ Plans

By default, there’s a membership plan created by Voxel named the Fallback plan.

Fallback plan

The fallback plan is a default, complimentary membership plan that all users are assigned. Essentially, this plan serves as the basic, free option given to everyone until they choose to upgrade to a premium plan. Moreover, this fallback plan is automatically applied to customers whose premium memberships have either expired or been cancelled.

Using Voxel conditions, we can target different membership plans to enable or restrict access to different features and content. As all non paying users will be assigned the fallback plan, it creates an easy way to target them using conditions.

Creating a membership plan

Membership plans can be created in WP admin ➝ Plans ➝ Add new

Once the plan is created, you can edit it. There are a couple of tabs in the plan editor

• General
• Post submissions
• Pricing
• Pricing (Test mode)

General

In the General tab, you can set the label and description and have the option to archive and delete a plan.

Archiving a membership plan will make it unavailable to new users. Users already on this plan will not be affected. Archived plans can be unarchived again or they can be deleted permanently

Post submissions

In the Post submissions tab, you can setup the post submission settings for users with this membership plan.

In the right sidebar, the post types available in your site are listed. Clicking on a post type will make that post type available for submission. The options available are split into three sub-tabs

Limits

Allows you to set the post limit for that post type and pick the statuses that count towards that limit:

• Submitted posts: All published and pending posts
• Active posts: All published posts
• Custom: Manually set which statuses count toward limit

Additions

Using plan additions, you can allow the customer to extend submission limits of their membership plan for an additional cost per post.

When a customer tries to submit a post after reaching their plan limits, a prompt will be shown asking them to either switch plan or increase limits of current plan. The subscription price is modified if customer increases limits.

Pricing

In the Pricing tab, you can create prices you want to make available for this membership plan.

When creating a price you can set:

• Amount
• Currency
• Price type: Recurring (Subscription) or One time purchase
• Billing period: Days, Weeks, Months
  

The same membership plan can have multiple prices for different billing periods.
This essentially means that the cost of the membership can change based on different factors. For instance, you could establish one price for customers who opt for a monthly billing cycle. Concurrently, you could set another, more enticing price for those who commit to a longer duration, like a 12-month period.

This strategy is often used as an incentive to encourage users to commit to longer-term plans.

Pricing (Test mode)

This tab contains the exact same settings, but the prices created here can only be used if Stripe Test mode is enabled. This enables you to thoroughly test and debug your platform before its official launch