I have a website at the moment built on wordpress and I am about to add members area feature with wishlist. Can anyone tell me if its a good way to do a members are on wordpress?
It is depends on the way you would do with the list, marketing strategy anyway. If your wordpress blog has enough readership and loyalty then you could reap benefits by sending periodically newsletter toward them. However, the list is not "all-in-all" solution I might add. It is not hard to add just a members feature but it would be hard to monetize on them it you do not have a good road map along with it.
Wishlist is ok, but has not much payment gateways. And their source code is encrypted. To provide your members with the latest info you don;t need a membership plugin. You can easily password protect a post for free. So if your members know the password they can enter the password and they can read the post.
This is the best no cost option to go with. Then you can always update to a more expensive method later if you decide to.