Hi, I know this has been covered in various posts and in the (tips & tricks section of the) manual, but please can you help me to understand the basics. I don't know where to start. In the manual, it talks about creating a site.php file in the folder amember/applications/configs, but I can't figure out what to put in it and how to remove things like the two-column layout, or the logout link, or the change password link. Please could you give me a completed model of a site.php sample file and explain what the various options (or bricks? or blocks?) are. In particular, I'd like to decide whether to list the active subscriptions or not... maybe just list the links to the active resources - and change the titles of these sections, e.g. "You are subscribed to the following products" and "Click on a link below to access your course", etc. Many thanks in advance, Gary
I think the best place to start is to decide how you want to use aMember. Most of your questions relate to using aMember as a stand alone solution. While you can use aMember to directly present the links to protected content, a more powerful and graceful way to do this is to integrate aMember with a content management system (CMS) front-end. The CMS then becomes the user's interface to content. Using this approach the user directly interfaces with aMember only for initial registration, product purchases, and renewals. aMember integrates with content management systems, learning management systems, social networks, and discussion forums. You need to decide which system best matches the needs of your site. One of the more feature-rich integrations is WordPress. WordPress itself (along with over 23,000 plugins) can be designed to serve a wide range of models. IMHO, it is important to plan out how you will implement aMember first, so you will be asking the right questions.
Thanks, but that's not what I meant. I'm already using Joomla and trying to control what amember presents to my members. I don't want members to end up in the amember user system. I only want to present them with what's relevant to the page they're on. I've been using wrappers up till now to keep my members within the framework of my site, but that's causing a lot of other problems. I've been advised to reproduce the look and feel of my Joomla website template for various amember pages. This will be very tricky, but I suppose with some very careful handcrafting of the HTML code it can be done. The question I have now is how to control what to display in the Member Area, once the member has logged in. I've managed to change style and text of the title, and include a note to the member. And I've also got rid of other irrelevant blocks (bricks?) But I need to change $content. Please see attachment. I want to remove the "useful links" because it takes the member to amember, where I lose control of what they do, and they can't find their way back to my site without typing in my domain name in the address bar manually. I also want to change the display to single column and move the "active resources" up to the top of the page - because that's what is relevant. Finally, "active subscriptions" should either be moved to the bottom of the page or removed entirely (perhaps placed in separate a "Your Account/Profile Details" page). I think I can figure out how to change the style by modifying the css template. But I don't know where to start to display or move the various parts of $content around. BTW, I added a note to the member area in amember/application/default/themes/mytheme/layout.phtml (to tell people to open their courses in a new window, otherwise they will be locked inside the Joomla wrapper), but the note now appears in the login page also. So how do I specify a different layout (or set of blocks) for each of the various amember-generated user pages? Many thanks for any help or tips to resolve this issue. From the forum questions, this seems to be a fairly typical issue when it comes to customizing the look and feel of amember to fit in with the website's original design.
David Moskowitz of Membership Academy knows more about setting up an aMember/Joomla site than probably anybody else on the planet. Actually the home page to his site is a Joomla/aMember powered site. If you want to get up to speed fast then I would suggest joining his site. If what you want to do is not covered in his premium videos, then you can always post your questions to other Joomla/aMember site builders in his active forum.
Thanks again, but I've already been there and I signed up as a guest. Some of the "premium" videos may address the issue, but I haven't been able to determine if they're any use to me. It costs more to join than the cost of amember itself ($200 for the year, or $80 just for one month's access to the "support" articles)! If no-one can help me on this forum then I think I'll just submit a support ticket, after all I've already paid for that.
Orish with respect it seems you are trying to completely rewrite the aMember user interface with no idea of how it works! Plus I, and I think Grant also, cannot really see what you are trying to achieve. Your attachment shows a modified user interface locked to a page - WHY? With most normal sites the content flows from the main home, Index, page and aMember is incidental, it works in the background, only being called when the need to login arises. You can have numerous, self designed, login boxes on your pages, you can also write custom pages to deal with profile, listing a members resources etc. The suggestion was made to join Membership Academy but cost seems to be an issue. For the amount of information there the cost is well worth it. Should that content be free? Will your site likewise offer all its valuable information for free? Likewise, with respect, because you say you have paid for aMember you will ask them for help customising your site. What cost are you expecting? aMember works, it works great, it is highly customisable but if you are expecting major changes then you really need to invest (time, money) in learning PHP etc so you understand how the program works and how to make the changes you are wanting. Would you expect Microsoft to carry out major customisation to their programs for free? I agree with Grant you need to fully plan what you want to achieve. Asking for examples of 'site.php' for example. This only contains coding for a specific site and of no use to another. It is also handy when asking specific questions that a web address is included so forum members can actually see your site and then make relevant suggestions.
Thanks for your very considered response. My website is www.learnthaionline.com. I'm trying to achieve exactly what you suggested: I want amember to be a transparent or integral part of my site. On my index page, for example, I want to allow people to login or sign up - if they're already a member then ideally I want them to be able to type in their email address and password there and then without having to first go to a "login/registration" page. I'll work on that bit later - with two links in the menu (login/register). Once logged in, ideally I want them to go straight to their Member Area, which must look like it's a part of my website - not something belonging to amember (currently, if I forward customers to the amember user interface, they end up on a page that looks completely different, and with no menu structure to allow them to get back to my home page or other parts of my site). I can only achieve the impression that they are still in my site by placing the amember page inside a Joomla wrapper - which is what you see in the images above. And if they register as new customers then I'd like to return them to the home page, which will now look slightly different. I've managed to do some of this with Joomla permissions. The new home page now has Member Area and Logout in the top menu. So no need for a logout link under "useful links" in the Member Area. In fact, amember's logout sends them back to my home page inside the wrapper. So I end up with a site inside a site. So I'd rather they don't see that link and only logout by clicking on the logout link in the menu. What I'm trying to achieve is a fairly standard way of managing customers and products/subscriptions. Most good sites do it this way and it's very elegant. Every unnecessary click only serves to irritate visitors. I'm trying to avoid using wrappers because it's not possible to control the parent page from within amember. But I'm having difficulty understanding exactly how to customize (or create) a template in amember to mimic my Joomla template. Each product has its own page. Customers can register for a particular product just by clicking a single button (if it's a free trial version then they should immediately go to the product access page, but it's a paid product then they will do so immediately after they return from PayPal). Whatever product they are signed up to gets listed in their Member Area. All I want is for them to see (only) the links to access the various products they've signed up to. They really don't need see duplicate information, the active resources and the active subscriptions are the same thing. Later, I'd also like to change the product pages for any product the customer has subscribed to. Instead of it being a sign-up (sales) page, it should simply be the access (or home) page to that product. I tried to do that with user permissions in Joomla, but I couldn't figure out how to only allow access to just the products they've subscribed to and display a "sales page" for the products they haven't purchased yet. As for your comments about asking the amember staff to customize my website, I think you misunderstand my question(s). I'm already doing my own customizations. The problem - and the reason for this thread - is that I can't find sufficient detail about the various components, assumptions, inner workings and "blocks" in the documentation. I see that I have to create a site.php file, but there's no description of what amember items go into this file and how to configure it. And no doubt, $200 is fairly reasonable for access to a library of articles and tutorials about how to customize amember in a Joomla or wordpress environment. But I'm not a developer developing several client sites (which seems to be who Amember Academy is aimed at), nor am I a corporation building a large, complicated website. It's just me, making what should be relatively small tweaks to my (one) site (one time) to make it user-friendly and easy to navigate. Amember4 is a tremendous improvement over the previous version, so I'm not complaining. It's still relatively unfinished - which is why some of the smaller changes need to be done at a relatively "deep" level. Ideally (just like JCK Editor), I should simply be able to enter the path to my site template in my Joomla configuration settings in the amember CP - and then everything that's part of amember should have the same look and feel as my own site. That's a feature request for the future. Secondly, amember should have a way to build/design/modify its internal user pages very much like the form designer for products. I think that's a great feature and very well implemented. But until it's available for all the other parts of the system, I'm ready and willing to "hard code" the changes by creating site.php or layout.phtml or other files. I just need detailed documentation on how to do this. It's a reasonable request. No need to sign up at $80 to get help on a few issues that need addressing now. And, in 3-4 months time if I need to tweak something else, to have to pay another $80 to get an answer... Once my site is running smoothly, I won't need any more "tutorials". What I'm trying to say that I don't think it's reasonable to pay $160-odd to get answers to a few relatively easy questions. $10-$15 a pop might be more reasonable. But if I'm going to be customizing sites regularly for myself or for other clients then $200 for a full year's access to all the customization possibilities for various kinds of sites and applications would also be reasonable, right?
Hello Guys, Please tell me, what is a different between the Active Subscriptions and the Active Resources? I'm trying to the demo but Im not understand why it is a duplicate and it can to disable or what is the function of the Active Resources? Big Thanks Botor
Orish To try to answer some of your question. site.php is simply there to allow custom changes to the aMember core code, For example custom css changescan be put there so that they will not be overwritten by future upgrades. Not all sites have this file. You want them 'to go to their membership area when logged in'. If for example on your main home page you had a link to a course, and that course was contained within a folder protected by aMember, when your member clicked on that link they would be taken to the aMember login page - login and get redirected to their course automatically. The actual aMember page can be made to look part of your site by writing a 'theme' based on the rest of your site. http://www.amember.com/docs/Themes_and_Templates solves your 'I'm having difficulty understanding exactly how to customize (or create) a template in amember to mimic my Joomla template.' You can easily include your own username/password box on one, or all pages, by using facilities such as http://www.amember.com/docs/API/Lite Using these routines you can also check if member is logged in and, if so, carry welcome message to replace the login boxes. The Am_Lite::getInstance()->isLoggedIn() function allows you to display different home pages depending upon if a person is logged in or incorporate Am_Lite::getInstance()->getProducts() and you can customise the page further depending upon which products they are subscribed to. With regards detailed use of Joomla I have no idea, I don't use either it or Wordpress on my site. All the pages were written by me with the members only content held within protected folders so aMember only pops up to log in, or other membership related issues.