Membership 1.4: new features to create reserved-access areas for your site members.

A project started with the hot weather in summer and completed on Halloween: we are proud to announce and introduce the brand-new YITH Membership for WooCommerce 1.4, the redesigned version of another of our flagship plugins.

The original idea was to do some UX refreshing to make the plugin easier to configure and use. Then, as it often happens, we started adding some new options here and there, improving the existing functionalities and making them even more interesting.

After creating the best plugins for Wishlist and Gift cards for WooCommerce available online, our next challenge was to transform our Membership plugin into one of the best plugins for the management of reserved areas and limited-access content.

We believe we have taken up the challenge successfully, but only the plugin users will have the last word on it. In the meantime, we will introduce you to the new features and the great work that the design and development teams have carried on, shoulder to shoulder, in the past three months.

What will you find in YITH Membership for WooCommerce version 1.4?

1. The new UX

Developing a huge plugin with hundreds of options but no good user experience is nonsense. It would be hard to find the options, hard to understand and to set up. Frustrated users would open many support tickets just to ask how to achieve a specific result because they cannot guess how to do that on their own, and this would increase the workload of the support team.
This is the reason why redesigning the panel and making it more usable was a priority for us since the very beginning.

We have moved up the options and reorganized the whole configuration panel, added brief and clear explanations to make the plugin setup easier than ever.

2. The possibility to include all contents (posts, pages, products) into a membership plan in one click

In the previous plugin version, it was possible to select specific contents (posts, pages, products) to assign them to a membership plan and make them accessible only to members. But what if the site has hundreds of posts and products? Selecting them all one by one used to be a nightmare.

Therefore, we have added some specific options to make sure that ALL products and ALL posts (even those that will be added at a later time) will be automatically associated with the membership plan.

3. The “Members-only content starts here” Gutenberg block

In the previous plugin version, it was not possible to set which part of the content was visible to all users and which part was visible to members only. The only way to do that was to create different versions of the same post or page, so manually copy the content, paste it into the “Alternative content” editor, and then remove the part that needed to be hidden from non-members.

This solution was making things more complicated for those who had to repeat such an action on a daily basis, so for example for people who run a blog or an online news website and publish dozens of posts every day.

To automate this process, then, we have added a Gutenberg blog that works like the standard “More” tag in WordPress: all that is BEFORE the “Members-only content starts here” block will be visible to ALL users, all that’s AFTER it will be visible TO MEMBERS ONLY.

For example, if you have a blog or an online magazine and you want that all users can read the introduction paragraph of your posts and that only members can read the full text, then, this is the solution you were looking for: you’ll just have to add the block (no more than two clicks!) and the plugin will automate the full process and protect your contents from those who don’t have the right to read them.

Using Elementor? No problem at all. We have added a widget with the same functionality.

4. The “Alternative Content” blocks

Setting up advanced content using just a text editor had many limitations: you could set up a simple text but you could not insert advanced elements like banners or, just by way of example, split the text into three columns. Moreover, every product or post page used to have its own text editor and it was impossible to create a global alternative content that could be set up once and used automatically for all the contents of your site.

That’s why we have added the “Alternative content blocks”: these are some Gutenberg blocks that can be configured and loaded as “alternative contents” for non-members. You can select a different Gutenberg block for each page/post/product or set up a global one if you want to show the same content on every page.

For example, create an “alternative block” that contains a persuasive text and a call-to-action to push your users to join your membership and you will be able to assign it to all your reserved-access posts or pages in one click.

5. Offer members a discount on all the products of your shop

Since version 1.4 you will be able to give members of every plan a specific % discount on all the products in the catalog.

You can assign different discounts based on the membership plan (for example Silver users will benefit from a 10% off, Gold users a 20% off) and the discount will automatically apply to all products in the shop.

6. Improvements on My Account page

We have drastically improved the general esthetics of the plugin frontend, with special regards to the My Account page and what the user sees.

All the membership details are no longer displayed on the dashboard but they are now showing up in a specific section (endpoint). This section has been totally redesigned too, so users can get a quick overview of their memberships and the available or downloadable contents.

Besides, we have made many smaller changes to the graphical appearance and corrected minor errors popping up during the redesign phase.

There’s still more work to be done, though: after all, we are already planning version 1.5 😀 but in the meantime, we’d invite you to take a look at the new Live Demos of YITH Membership for WooCommerce.

Yes, I’m referring to demos as plural because we’ve set up 5 of them, one for each of the most common use cases.

Do you want to learn more about this wonderful plugin? Just take a look at the landing page of YITH Membership for WooCommerce >