New Membersip System

[Dan Vis]

Hi Everyone,

Haven't had any feedback yet on 7.00. Guess everyone is waiting to give it a try till it gets out of the "semi-experimental" mode!  Or it's all working perfectly. :)

Today I put the new membership system I've been planning for BoltWire in the core and will be releasing 7.01 very soon. Just want to let it simmer for a couple days and make sure everything is working like it's supposed to.

I did make a serious change in my plan, however, and I just put up a new blog post describing what happened. Here's the link:

https://www.boltwire.com/blog/membership-vs-crm 

I've also been doing a lot of work updating the content in the hosting section of the BoltWire site, to finalize my plans. If you get a chance, I'd appreciate feedback on the Launch Accelerator curriculum, and the Pro Module list I've settled on. Anything major I've missed?

Cheers,

Dan

[mz]

Hi Dan

I have read both blog posts but I did not get it.

Email messaging as well as blogging with email will be dropped?

For a full membership system you recommend using another provider like Mailchimp?

Then this provider will pull the content via an api?

The idea using tags is clever.

Greetings, Martin

[Dan Vis]

No, I think you might have missed the point slightly. In a highly interactive site like mine, I'm customizing every aspect of the users experience based on information I've gleaned from them. That information is stored in my website, but I use it to run email automations, send messages to specific segments, merge member data into my emails, track actions like clicked links, and much more--all through my crm. And it's a constant battle to keep my data and the crm fully in sync.

I also do email confirmations, password reminders, create landing pages, popups, and much more through my own site. And it's taken a mountain of code to be able to create that interactivity. But those are all things my crm can do effortlessly. And maybe better.

So the idea is to have BoltWire store my member data in the crm and  then access whatever information it needs to do its thing via their API, rather than keeping that information squirreled away somewhere in my site. The crm thus stays permanently in sync (in fact it becomes the repository) and BoltWire can function without having to replicate all those features available in the crm. 

Let's say someone wants to become a member and subscribe to my blog. I use the crm to do the double optin and even store their password there. When they login, I check to see if they are subscribed in the crm and if the password matches what's stored there. Or let's say someone joins a class for example. BoltWire tags them in my crm as being in the class rather than storing that information somewhere in BoltWire. When they go to access the class, BoltWire just checks with the crm to see if they have that tag and grants or denies access based on that. When they finish the class, I remove the tag, or tag them as a graduate. 

All BoltWire needs is access to a simple api to subscribe, unsubscribe, and read/write tags. And the crm does all the database storage on the back end.

I was just working on the BoltWire site today, and took a preliminary stab at this. And it was amazing how easy it was to setup the double optin. I have the code on my site to manage all that, and I could have imported it, but it would have taken all day to test and tweak it. Through the crm, it was a 15 minute job.

This doesn't mean I'll be removing any functionality currently in BoltWire. And this approach is not even going to be the primary approach used in the core. I will actually be upgrading the existing membership system so Boltwire can do even more internally--and I won't be stripping anything out. But I'm pretty sure it will be the approach I use with the Hosting Service, as it dramatically simplifies things for me and for the client. All I need to do is provide a crm module and explain how to use it.

With the new membership system (which I've pretty much completed) there is a super simple system for adding hooks to read and write member data. I actually designed it that way to accommodate potential databases. And I already have all the crm api hooks--so it's just connecting things up, and I'm good to go.

I did end up going a fair bit further than what I was thinking when I wrote my blog post on the membership system--by switching to an email login system by default. The core doesn't do double optins, so it's just as easy and instant as before. But it gives you a way to reach out with transactional emails. And makes it easier to switch over to a crm approach if you wanted. I will probably provide a basic email confirmation plugin (as that's super important) and a password reminder plugin, but that those won't be in the core, and won't be required for BoltWire to work.

And in fact the new membership system works so well, I could forget the crm approach completely and just use something like mailgun to send emails. I do like the code I've put together for my own site. But it is a lot of work. The point being, you can go any direction you want with BoltWire... 

You'll also be happy to know I'll be adding a "simple login" plugin so users can upgrade existing sites and keep their current login and registration systems if they wish.

Let me know if you still have questions. Probably need to update the blog post to keep it current...

Cheers,
Dan

Climb higher in your walk with God...

WWW.FASTMISSIONS.COM

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