aMember to the rescue

I recently set up a new LMS (Learning Management System) plugin on my Wordpress-based, aMember-protected website. Fine... except that there were a few bugs with the LMS.

At first, their rather grumpy tech support people blamed it on a specific plugin. Then I disabled the offending plugin and the bug was still there. Well, they said (more grumpily than ever), that means some plugin you use, or have used in the past, has completely messed up this Wordpress installation, and if you want our plugin to work at all it will have to be in a completely new Wordpress installation in a subdirectory. Don't worry, this will be easy to do and you can be set up within a couple of days!

Hah.

The courses I'm creating in this LMS are part of my paying membership. A member joins and gets access to different content in my current Wordpress site, and to my forums, and also to these courses.

Imagine, for a moment, what would have happened if I'd been using an ordinary Wordpress add-on to manage memberships. All the member information would be just in the database of the original Wordpress installation, so how would you use that to control access to courses on a completely separate installation? Can you somehow copy the list of members across? And then how do you synchronise them as people join and leave? I have no idea. Probably you just give up.

I contacted aMember support to ask if it was possible to use it with two Wordpress installations, and if so, how complicated would it be? Answer (prompt, friendly and refreshingly not at all grumpy): install the Amember-Wordpress plugin on your new Wordpress. That's all you need to protect the content. Oh, if you want the users to be logged in to the new Wordpress too, add this one line of code here, and set up a second Wordpress integration in aMember.

It's that simple. The whole process took under an hour.

I have one complaint: years of aMember support have given me unrealistically high expectations for everyone else's.