Is there any step-by-step guide in building a membership site? i want to create a paid membership site, but cant find any good information. most information i have come across just gives me the "why" but not the "how" part.
Well it depends on what you mean my paid membership. like what is it for? You could always make a wordpress enabled site and add an ecommerce plugin where they need to pay to access some parts of the site! You need to post more details
how would i go about setting up a subscription site? i want something like a messageboard/forum but also another page where paid members can access that has products. is there a guide on this?
Hmmm. Well you could use vbulletin/phpbb3 or whatever as your message board. Then also make a site using wordpress. So to access forums its free. To access your site they need to pay which you can just setup simple plugin in wordpress etc!
There is a product called How To Setup A Membership Site in 6 minutes or something similar. I think I have it on my other computer, but that was a very good course on how to do this, with videos and everything. Based on WP. Tom
Why not using one of those free PHP/MySQL scripts all over the Net ? Customize it and it will be perfect !
i have a membership site with wordpress, very easy to do. wpestore and WP eMember are the two plugins required to run a paid membership website
... You should be able to do this with any kind fo good CMS. DNN, Drupal, JOOMLA etc. give you the option to create public and private areas. The public areas is what the search engines and the normal visitors see. The private areas can be seen by logged in visitors. In order to get a log in, you can ask for a charge. Payment methods are of course a different game and also how to manage memberships and the fees.