[Kirk]

Hi Pauley13,

Something to consider since your requirements and workflows are probably stretching the limits of this free support forum.

I provide a service where I completely configure and setup eMember and any of the other Tips and Tricks plugins. It might save you a lot of time so you can get on with working on your business. If you are interested, have a look at my website and contact me there:

http://wpfullservice.com/custom-work/

Thanks,

Kirk.

[Kirk]

You will probably always need to do some customization to get your site looking just right and integrated with eCommerce plugins etc.

Just to give you a demo of what can be done, here is a WordPress eCommerce site for physical goods that I created.

It’s an off-the-shelf theme that is integrated with WP eStore / WP eMember and Affiliate Platform.

See: [http://physical-estore-jewelry.wpfullservice.com/]

Contact me via my website and I can give you some advice if you want to do something similar, since that’s what I specialize in – WP eCommerce integration.

Thanks,

Kirk.

[Kirk]

All images and content can be changed to suit your requirements.

I just added a heap of sample data so people can see what the final result would look like.

Contact me via my website contact form to discuss.

[Kirk]

Hi, I might have a solution for you.

I integrated the eStore / eMember and Affiliate plugins from Tips and Tricks HQ into a premium WordPress eCommerce theme using a customized child theme.

Have a look at the demo:

[http://physical-estore-jewelry.wpfullservice.com/]

It even has “Member Specials” that only members can purchase and a bunch of other features.

Since you have already purchased the plugins, contact me at [http://wpfullservice.com/contact/] and I’m sure we can work something out to get you online and selling your products.

Thanks,

Kirk.

[Kirk]

Your solution works, but will cause too much of a maintenance issue trying to keep everything in sync. Also it might be too much effort for non-technical people who just want their site to work and are not confident fiddling with .htaccess files etc.

For my own sites where I have to stream video and have protected downloads for website members, I store all the files on Amazon S3 and I use the WP Lightbox Ultimate plugin from Tips and Tricks HQ. You can also use S3FlowShield which is pretty good, but it is 3x more expensive.

Then all you need to do is upload all your files to Amazon S3 and set the folder permissions accordingly. Name your buckets something unique like ‘media.yourdomain.com’. This way, if you ever sell your site, you can just create the ‘media’ subdomain on your site and upload everything into that subdomain. A few tweaks on relevant pages and everything will be working the same (not secure, but the new owner can then copy the files to their own S3 account).

Then just protect your posts / pages so your members have to login to view the videos etc.

If you are on shared hosting, I strongly recommend to use Amazon S3 to reduce the load on your web server, otherwise a few people downloading video files will slow down your site to other visitors, and hence you could be losing sales due to your unresponsive web server.

I use VPS and dedicated servers, and even though I have more CPU power than shared hosting, I still use Amazon S3 to keep my sites responsive.

The cost to use Amazon S3 is very low. Easily less than a few dollars a month, even for moderate usage.

Have a look at the screencast I did on “How to Embed Protected Videos from Amazon S3”.

http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-lightbox-ultimate-plugin-display-media-in-a-fancy-lightbox-overlay-3163

The plugin has been updated since then and it is now easy to add secure links to files as well, just using the plugin.

PS: Here’s another tip. Make sure you have a valid email address which is webmaster@yourdomain.com. The reason being is that if you make errors in your .htaccess file and cause a server error, the default error given to the user will be something like “contact the owner at webmaster@yourdomain.com”. This way, if something goes wrong, a nice person might send you an email that your site is broken. If you don’t have that ‘webmaster’ email address, then you won’t be contactable.

[Kirk]

For my sites, I configure eMember to integrate with the standard WordPress users.

The reason being, that in the future if you want to add something like a bbPress Forum (which is now a WordPress plugin), then all the users that have already registered at your site can use the forum (and do not need to register again).

You can use a Role Manager plugin and assign different roles to users and selectively only give users with a particular role write access to the forum as well.

More details here:

http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-membership/using-emember-with-another-plugin-that-uses-the-wordpress-user-roles-350

[Author]

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