This plugin enables your website to accept registrations and provides a login session for your members. The members plugin is a requirement for many of the other plugins available and is a dependency for them. For example, the Shop and Subscriptions plugins take advantage of its feature-set and required it to operate.
Note: It's not important for you to know a plugins dependencies. During installation, dependencies are evaluated and automatically installed.
When you accept registrations it is important to be able to manage accounts. The members plugin comes with an account manager where you can edit an accounts' status, personal and contact information. The account status becomes important when you configure the registration and authentication process.
The members plugin offers a create deal of configuration options for both registrations and authentication so lets take a look at those.
The registration can be tailored to your needs and has many options available. First we will look at information gathering. Members allows you to split information gathering into two stages. The first stage is at the registration form itself. The second stage is after account verification when the user logs in.
The information that you gather is divided into configurable options but the mandatory field for registration is email address. Additional information that can be gathered are user information ( first and last name ), password, phone number, and address. Each of these can be collected at either stage.
Addresses have options as well. A country list can be specified to restrict registrations to one or more countries as well an option to accept members worldwide.
Members allows passwords to be either collected of generated in a couple ways. Generated passwords are included along with the registration/welcome email. A generated password can be set as temporary which means the password that must be changed after first login. The other option is to ask the user to create their own password, this can be done at the registration stage or after signup.
You can further security by enforcing account verification which currently only supports email as well as account recovery by enforcing security questions. Security questions can be set to optional or mandatory.
You can control the authentication that Members enforces. This deals with failed login attempts and what to do when it happens excessively. The first option is to do nothing in which case the sign-in page will temporarily block the user from further login attempts for a few minutes. Nothing will happen to that users account status.
The remaining options tells Members to take action against repeated failed login attempts. These actions include deactivating and suspending the account. When an account is deactivated, the user must reset their password to reactivate thier membership. A suspended account cannot be reactivated meaning the member is locked out and will have to contact you to lift the suspension.
Roles are a key feature of your fliddo website and provides a way to control and restrict content. The members plugin supports roles and allows you to manage them in account manager.
