Membership System
The Masterstudy LMS plugin is integrated with the Paid Memberships Pro plugin and works smoothly together to create a Membership System with Subscription Plans on your website.
Paid Memberships Pro plugin is 100% GPL and available at www.paidmembershipspro.com. The full version of the plugin is offered with no restrictions. Some add-ons require PMPro Plus license type - https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/pricing/.
Membership Pages
This third-party plugin allows you to create Membership Levels (Plans). First, create the default pages for a membership system. Go to Dashboard > Memberships > Settings and open the Pages tab. Select between two options Generate Pages For Me or Create Pages Manually.
We recommend you select the first option. So PMPro plugin will generate all the required pages with shortcodes automatically.
Remove the Login and Account pages from the settings. So the system will use LMS login and account pages instead.
Membership Plans
Now you can start to create Membership Plans, go to Dashboard > Memberships > Settings > Levels and select the Create a Membership Level option.
Then from the opened Pop-up window, you need select a Membership Level Template. Paid Memberships Pro has level settings for almost any type of level you can imagine. When creating a new level, select a template from the list that best fits the type of level you need:
Note that even though you may have chosen a template to set up your level, you can still access every individual level setting if you decide to change your one-time payment level to recurring later.
Membership Level Settings
Here you can set up Plan options such as name, description, confirmation message, billing options, and much more.
General Information.
Give the name for your Membership level which will be visible to the public. Writing the description of the level is optional and it will be displayed on the checkout page. A Confirmation Message is also optional and will be on the checkout confirmation page.
Billing Details
Here you need to set the price for the Membership plan to charge the users. Since we choose a monthly template the system offered a basic configuration. The price and billing cycle can be changed according to your needs.
Expiration Settings
This option can be enabled if you need to cancel the Membership level of the user after a certain period of time.
Note that the member’s recurring subscription (if any) will be canceled when the membership expires.
Content Settings
You can select the Blog posts from specific categories and pages to hide from Non-member users.
Other Settings
Other settings include additional configurations for installed addons of Paid Membership Pro and integrated services. This section includes STM LMS settings where you can set course limits for the current plan.
How to set course limits for a plan
You can set up subscription plans more carefully to provide customers with more flexibility. General limits for subscription plans are available under the MS LMS Setting.
Number of available courses in subscription - here you can specify the number of available courses in the subscription. This means that users can enroll in several courses (the exact number you set yourself) after purchasing the plan.
Number of featured courses quote in subscription - this limit allows Instructors to make their courses as featured.
Before purchasing a plan
After purchasing a plan
Plan tab name - you can display plans with similar options under certain tabs. You need to use the same tab name in your plans for this.
How to set course categories for a certain plan
There is also the Private Category section where you can specify the course category(ies) for the plan, so after purchasing the subscription users will be able to enroll in several courses within the chosen category(ies):
At least one category should be selected in the Private Category section. You can not leave the section empty.
Besides this, there is a function that allows you to Disable/Enable one-time purchases on courses in this category.
When one-time payment is enabled for all courses from selected categories, the courses will be available for everyone. Students can purchase the course separately or enroll using the Membership level.
This also can be done from the Course settings. Edit the needed course with Course Builder, and go to the Price tab. Here you can disable a one-time purchase as well and make the course available only for subscription plans.
When one-time payment is disabled for all courses from selected categories, the courses become "Members only", and cannot be enrolled without a Membership level.
All the courses that are available for subscriptions only will be marked as Members only.
It is possible to exclude certain courses from the Membership level in the selected courses category.
This also can be done from the Course Builder. Open the needed course, go to the Price tab, and enable the Not Included in membership option:
Even if the course category is selected in the membership level, the Course will not be included in the Membership plan:
Payment Settings
Payment Gateway also should be set up separately for membership plans. Go to the Memberships > Settings > Payment Gateway & SSL section. There you can set a payment method, currency, available credit cards, sales tax, and SSL settings.
You can read more on how to set up payment settings here.
Purchase a plan
Now students can enroll in the course via the subscription plan. To access the course they need to click on the Get Course and select a plan from the drop-down menu.
The course can be available in several plans. So users need to select a suitable plan they would like to purchase.
After a user chooses the plan he can proceed to checkout. Here, users need to provide personal
and payment information:
After that, they will be notified about membership activation and receive a copy of the invoice by email.
Then users will be redirected to the course page.
Users also have the possibility to change or cancel membership plans in the My Memberships section from the profile page.
Customizing Membership levels page.
After generating pages for Paid Membership Pro the nesseary pages will be automatically created.
The new appearance of the Membership levels is available from version Masterstudy LMS 2.94. If you created the Membership Levels using the previous version of the Masterstudy LMS plugin both page builders Elementor and WPBakery will have the old-style membership page.
To get a new style of the Membership levels you need to manually edit the page following the steps below. You need to customize the Membership plans appearance edit the Membership plans page through Dashboard > Memberships > Settings > Pages:
To edit the page, select the page builder which is used by the installed theme:
Select the Membership Plans widget from the menu bar on the left-hand side of your screen then drag and drop it into the selected area.
You will get a window with the basic setting options under the Content tab. In the Button section you can change the position of the Get Started buttons:
You can add labels in the Plan label section for selected pricing plans to attract users for this plan:
In the Plans items icons section, you can replace the default icon for Level descriptions from the icons library.
Now, by clicking on the Style Tab you can customize the alignment of the items, typography, margin, padding, color, and many more for used items in the Membership Plans widget:
If you want to add motion effects, background, or make the page responsive, click on ‘Advanced’ to explore those options. This ‘Advanced’ tab is a default feature of Elementor. Give a read to this Document to know more about Advanced features and their uses.
It is possible to add more widgets to the Membership levels page in order to include more information.
Finally, after completing all the customization click on ‘Publish’ to see your work live.
Great job! You have done it successfully.
What will happen if the student loses the membership?
The status of the membership plan can be checked from the Memberships tab of the Student Dashboard:
Once a student loses the membership plan, all the courses that he got using this membership plan will also be lost. Membership Plan should be reactivated (purchased) again to recover the access.
Students can be notified via email once their Membership comes to an end. To do it email settings of the Paid Memberships Pro plugin and SMTP settings on your website should be configured.
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