I'm looking to start a membership site, 2 levels, free and paid. I want to start with a free or little cost solution so that I can gain some experience in managing such a site. However, I have a membership script with most of the bells and whistles but lack the knowledge for installing it. Your suggestions/opinions are greatly appreciated.
My coworker loves Joomla but I thought it was really tough to use. I like Wordpress as a CMS better, but I don't know how it works with subscription sites. There's probably a plugin somewhere to help... Janet
Joomla might be good for membership site but you will have tough time optimising it the site for search engines.
Utter piffle. Anyway, there's actually subscription plugins for Joomla so you can block areas off to free users and open bits up to paying users. I never tried it myself though, but here is one such component: http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,1232/Itemid,35/
Hi There, Yes Joomla is very good for membership sites. You can find a component called community builder which is good for registration, user profiles etc. You can add functionality via other plugins to get member messsages, chat etc. The link above may help for paid memberships too, but you should look at community builder first I think. Also, Joomla SEO is not that hard. Find a component called Sh404sef - this is very good for search engine optimisation.
Joomla is junk for security. In no way do you want to associate paid memberships with an insecure cms like joomla. Take a look at subdreamer and vbulletin integration - http://www.subdreamer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7124 Payment processing and, user group management with the payments is already built into vbulletin, so no add-ons are needed. Using this system you should be able to put together as many paid packages as you want. Both solutions are commercial grade - this means you will be able to get real support instead of begging for support in the so called joomla "support" forums. When I needed help with joomla, some of my threads were never answered, leaving me to deal with the problem myself. The joomla support forums are about the worst managed forums I have ever seen.
Joomla is a good way to go. It is my CMS of choice. To create a membership site you need 3 components:- Community Builder JACL AEC all available from the joomla extensions site. if you would like any more help, pm me.
I have had to help 3 different people recover from direct hacking of the their joomla site and 2 different sql injections this week alone. While it's pretty easy to set and up use, it's a trainwreck in terms of code and security. Nigel
That all depends on how you configure it, when a site is finished I always lock it down, in a variety of ways which make hacking it extremely difficult, moving the main configuration.php out of the root and out of a web accessible folder is a big one. I do know there was a massive hole in 1.5 which brought Joomla itself down but it was sorted out very quickly. As I always say, security is a process rather than a goal.