Wordpress Membership Plugin - MemberWing. And it’s free!

If you want to convert your wordpress blog into membership site and shy spending hundreds of dollars upfront - keep reading!

The new free wordpress membership plugin - MemberWing allows to convert your existing blog into membership site without any changes or re-designs.

MemberWing was built with Search Engine Optimization and speed in mind.

By inserting small text marker "{+++}" inside any article (old or new) - the content of it will become "protected" and available only to registered premium members. Simply put - anything that was before the marker - is visible for everyone - so put your teasers here. Anything after the "{+++}" marker will only be visible to users who are "Gold" or "Platinum" members. This is great feature that allows search engines to index and rank free text "teasers" part of your blog/website. Other plugins and multi-hundred dollars membership software packages does not have this very useful feature. They just lock site completely leaving you on your own with zero chance for organic rankings.

Once activated, plugin created 4 separate group members - Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. So you may (if wanted to) have 4 classes of contents and charge fees accordingly to access each class of contents. The way you mark contents of your articles for each group is the same simple one - via markers that separate free teasers from premium "juicy" part. {+} - Bronze members, {++} - Bronze and Silver members, {+++} - Bronze, Silver and Gold members, etc..

Membership plugin MemberWing supports latest version of self-hosted Wordpress 2.6+ and works on any hosted account that allows wordpress installations.

I've installed it here - and protected this article

Here's how your protected article will look like, when viewed by non-premium member:

...{+}

The rest of this article is available to premium members only. Become a member
(You can customize this text and links)

[ Guarded by Wordpress Membership Plugin - MemberWing ]

How to reboot/reset/restart iPhone or iPod touch

Wordpress folks recently released free application that allow you to manage your Wordpress blog directly from iPhone or iPod touch. This free neat app lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. It supports Wordpress 2.5.1 and higher as well as Wordpress MU.

I downloaded it but experienced a problem where application would just close by itself right after starting up. Sincerely - it started to happen after I also downloaded a few games as well. Not sure whether different apps started to conflict with each other or iPod developed some sort of Windows-ish need-to-be-rebooted-often-to-work-properly syndrome.

So to fix it I removed a few games and performed the following "soft reboot" procedure:

Press and hold down the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button (top edge of your device) simultaneously for a few seconds. The iPhone/iPod's display will clear. Then the Apple logo appears. In a few more seconds the whole system gets back to normal. Reboot/restart is done.

After that my new Wordpress App worked properly.

How to prevent wordpress from messing up with your rich editing tags

After spending countless hours fighting with wordpress changing my tags and text formatting in it's rich text editor I finally decided to create a tiny little cute plugin that makes wordpress to leave alone my HTML formatting, tags and line breaks. Essentially the source code of the whole thing is this:

function myautop ($text) { return $text; }
function mytext  ($text) { return $text; }
remove_filter ('the_content', 'wpautop');
add_filter    ('the_content', 'myautop');
remove_filter ('the_content', 'wptexturize');
add_filter    ('the_content', 'mytext');

You may download actual plugin from the link below. Just unzip, copy it into ./plugins directory, activate and enjoy. Note: to fix another big annoyance with Wordpress eliminating line breaks - this is what I use to "create" line breaks that Wordpress doesn't kill. In HTML mode insert this code:

<div style="margin:2em;"><span style="display:none;">-</span></div>

Advantage of this method is that you can regulate size of your "custom line break" by changing value in "margin" CSS tag. Bonus TIP: Actually I just found a better way to keep linebreaks: Advanced TinyMCE plugin seems to add lot more features to TinyMCE editor as well as has an option to stop Wordpress's messing up with line breaks.

Download: WP-AllowTags Wordpress Plugin that allows inserting tags